My dearest friend Peiyi married at the beginning of October and she asked me to be her maid of honour! Of course I said yes, and of course I had to sew a special dress for such a special occasion. Burda Style 10/2015 Nr. 113 A was basically love at first sight. It was elegant yet unobtrusive but still unusual enough to be an interesting and unique addition to my wardrobe. And look, the blue matched the belt of the bride’s dress, wasn’t that a perfect coincidence? Also, Peiyi was absolutely radiant and gorgeous, don’t you agree?

Initially I wanted to make the dress in a grey stretch fabric and bought the blue wool only for a test version. I got in such a time crunch however that it ended up being the only and final version … In hindsight, I consider that a happy accident because I simply love that dark blue.

The dress has a rather unusual construction – the short zipper in the front is the only one you put in! Unfortunately, the interesting construction that drew me to this dress was also kinda my downfall. The pattern should be fairly easy because it doesn’t require any advanced sewing techniques, but it took me ages to figure out which pattern pieces to sew in which way to stitch to each other.

I thought I did fine until I ended up with a huge fabric flap at the back that had nowhere to go. If I took out enough fabric to be able to stitch the collar together, I couldn’t put on the dress anymore. I thought about putting in a zipper, but it did weird things to the hip and waist area, so I eventually settled on leaving space between the back collar pieces, sans zipper. (Sorry for my failure to verbalize the process more. It’s been a while since sewing the dress and I still don’t exactly get where I went wrong.)

That said, I’m still really happy with the end result! Even though it looks very sophisticated, it’s surprisingly comfortable which is really important if you have to wear it from early in the morning until way past midnight! It was such a lovely wedding, too. The ceremony was held at the open-air museum in Münster in the most beautiful sunshine. What a happy day!

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Pattern: Burda Style 10/2015 Nr. 113 A

Fabric: Some kind of wool fabric that was on sale for 8€/m at Stoffwelt Neu-Ulm.

Photography: Patricia (thanks!)