Burda Style Magazine 05/2006 Blouse

While browsing through my patterns and magazines looking for suitable blouse patterns for my work outfit, this pattern catched my eye. It reminded me of Vogue 8747, but the gathering is at the side front, and the collar is different.

Fabric

The fabric is a stretch cotton which has a bit of shine to the right side. It is tightly woven with stripes, rather stiff and was a pain to sew. It was difficult to get pins into it and handsewing was not relaxing but hard work…I think this is due to the stretch content.

Alterations:

I made a muslin and did the following fitting alterations:

1. took in the side seams 1 cm at the waist
2. reduced the width above the bust of the center front piece by 2 cm
3. decreased the width of the center front piece by 1 cm over the whole length at the seam

I also drafted a new front facing. Burda does not include separate facing pieces, they just have a line drawn on the front piece that shows how the facing should look like.

Due to the gathering the center front is not straight but curved. It straightens out after gathering, but the fabric is on the bias. I could not imagine that with a facing also cut this way there would be enough stability at the center front. So I drew a new facing with a straight center line. It was a bit try and error to decide how long it should be. I think this was the right decision to keep the center front with the buttons and buttonholes stable. You see how the stripes are changing their direction at the center front:

Design alterations

The original back of the Burda pattern did just not work for me. Even with the center back seam, it was too much fabric that I would have had to take out at the waist. I started thinking about adding darts and changing them into princess seams to be consistent with the front. But then I remebered Vogue 8747, a pattern that I have sewn before and I knew that the back fit me well. So I exchanged the original back with the back of the Vogue pattern. To make this work, I transferred the armhole, neckline and shoulder line from the Burda pattern to the new back pieces. As a reference point I used the center back and the shoulder line. I also adjusted the side seam so that it would match the front piece. This worked out really good and I am happy with the result. Below are the old and new back pattern pieces:

A welcome side effect is that I could enter the blouse in the “Frankenstein Contest” at pattern review.

Construction Notes

All seams are flat felled seams, even the princess seams at the front. Due to the gathering here, they are not as neat. I always find it difficult to decide how to finish princess seams, and I wanted to avoid serged edges. I had however to serge the edge of the front facings. I thought a lot how I could finish those edges, but everything except serging seemed to add too much bulk.

The collar was quite tricky and I am not sure if I did everything correctly. I found a tutorial in a German forum with many pictures, but unfortunately for the important steps the pictures were blurred and the description rather short. If you know a good tutorial, how to attach a lapel collar to a blouse, please let me know! Here are some views from the inside of the blouse:

Front edge, collar and cuffs are topstitched.

As the weather was so nice this afternoon we took the pictures in the botanical garden of Hamburg: