I busted out this dress, hopefully just in time to make the deadline for the Patternreview Colorblock Contest! If not, no biggie, just a prize gift certificate to my favorite online fabric store, Mood.

There were a bunch of wonderful entries, so I might have come in about 5th place, maybe, with this little dress:

I saw this dress pattern, Burda 6851:

on the Simplicity.com website, and thought it was perfect for a color blocked project (I believe my first!), and something I could easily interpret for my needs.

Once I started researching the pattern online (Google, Yahoo Images), with only one other pattern review on Patternreview.com, I found that someone pinned on Pinterest this pattern as an, um, EXACT copy of a Donna Karan dress from her Fall 2015 line, so of course I was even more excited to make this dress!

This dress was a pretty simple sew. The hardest part was adding the zipper, which was instructed as an invisible zipper, but I chose a semi-exposed, plastic zipper with black trimmed zipper teeth, a black zipper pull, and a clear white plastic zipper tape, as my seemingly cool zipper alternative:

Well, my cool zipper idea kind of backfired because the zipper is a tad too heavy and stiff for the ponte knit weight, and the ends of the zipper are super plastic-y and won’t behave with the top and bottom seams, thus leaving a bumpy, lumpy and scratchy interior of the zip area. Not great, but a good effort.

Had I had the time, and sewing buddy to help, or an exact clone of myself to come in handy, I would have “pinched out” at the mid back of this dress to avoid that nasty bubble at the back. I also would have adjusted the underarm weirdness at the dolman sleeve “meeting”:

As well as lost the trying-too-hard “deer in headlights” look on my face. Really Steph?

Overall, it was a great dress to sew up in a few days. I may sew it again, I may not, but I really should be making my own patterns at this point, and making them unique.

Oh well! I enjoy letting others do the pattern making (thank you Burda!), and doing the fabric and construction stuff for me, thus my love affair with commercial patterns!

 

Tootles for now and see you soon!

Happy Holidays!