"Dalia"nces

Hubby and I celebrated a wedding anniversary recently. One of those landmark ones  where the number ends in a zero.  A great reason to sew a special dress.

On a sewing related  Facebook group, there was a post from a woman making a dress with an embroidered lace fabric she had purchased at JoAnn's. The embroidered flowers were described as Dahlias, but did not look like any I grow in my garden.

  I instantly recognized it as the fabric used to make Vogue  9372,  Hmm, a bit much for me.

 and  the  April 2019  Burdastyle style 118. This one I like.

The Burda dress is a great special occasion style. Fitted through the body, with an  off the shoulder neckline and asymmetrical collar. There was a couple yards of the fabric available at my local store and it was on sale.   In short order it was on my sewing table.

The dress is underlined, except for the sleeves.  I hand basted the rayon underlining to all the lace pieces, then treated these basted pieces of fabric as one for further sewing. My serger and sewing machine were able to handle the  layer of underlining and the random heavily embroidered areas of  the lace, but they both sounded like an all terrain vehicle traveling on rough ground.

hand basted underlining

I made a size 42 from the waist up and a size 44 below. I have smaller, squarish, forward shoulders and I wanted the shoulder area to fit well so I did a lot of fitting in that area and customized the darts on the RHS sleeve  and collar. I  applied twill tape to the shoulder seam of the unlined lace sleeve to stabilize that part of the neckline  during fitting, and sewing on the collar.

Twill tape on neckline seam 

 Since all garment sections are underlined (except for sleeves) there is no lining, and the neckline is supposed to be finished by a facing. The facing  pattern was a rather odd shape.

 Since I had custom fit the neckline, I didn't want to transfer those changes to the facing pattern and add even more layers of fabric to the neckline seam,  I chose to face the neckline with a 1.5" grosgrain ribbon that I shaped to the neckline.  

Burda 4 2019 dress 118 side

Burda 4 2019 dress 118 front

Burda 4 2019 Dress 118

Dahlia flowers on my dress, to celebrate 40 years of marriage (and no dalliances).