The Dreamed Jeans Dress

This year I was offered the Burda subsrciption and somehow, it makes me less motivated to sew from the magazines I am receiving and I am somehow less inspired by the models. It really feels like this year, Burda focuses on the basics or extremely original models. We'll see how that goes for the rest of the year.

However, this dress in the March issue got marked almost immediately. I even liked the fabric, well, let's be clear, I wanted exactly this dress.

Then, the lockdown came in, I was sewing other stuff, till I came across a favourite Burda sewist who made it as well. Now, I decided to make it.

I started looking for the right fabric, either very light jeans or tencel and realized that tencel in the right colour is actually quite hard to get online. And the light jeans was almost the same. Actually, most of what I found were clear or very typical jeans colour fabrics. Me not wearing blue very much and not being used to wearing jeans, I wanted either a very dark blue or something little bit different. I ended up finding this blue/grey light jeans with some elasthane at tissus.net. This was in the middle of the French lockdown and most people over the internet were complaining of long delivery times with them. I ordered anyhow, because... well, I did not find better. To be honest, when ordering, the site announced 1 month expedition delay and did not lie, the order was sent out exactly after one month. Count 10 more days for delivery, because while in Germany DHL was rather quick, in France, it was handled by the post and the post service was extremely disappointing during the lockdown times.

 

Sooo, after much waiting, I could finally muslin and sew the dress. (well, you could say that I could have muslin it even before but I was making other stuff as well).

I did my petite adjustments and took away little bit of volume in the sleeves. I also slightly narrowed the decorative ruffles - I actually found out that "decorations", pockets and other details are always the same size, which does not make sense, it is often way too big for me (being on the bottom of the size chart) and it must be too little for the 42/44 sizes. So I am now rather careful and adjust this kind of things by easily 0,5-1cm.

As for the inside, I frenched the big seams and bound the rest. I even used the facing, a rare case for me.

Here, I must admit that I did a huge mistake when cutting the dress. I forgot that the front of the dress needs to be cut in 2 pieces to account for the zip. I pondered about cutting it anyhow but losing even 2cm around the bust and waist would probably be too much. Then I saw an idea of sewing a lapped zipped and decided to go for that. It was definitely not the easiest way, but the zipper is partially covered by the ruffles, so even though it is not perfect, it is OK and it works.

I did sew the fabric belt and I will definitely wear it with it as well, but I like the dress both ways!