Teenage Tartan

My daughter had expressed an interest in a short plaid dress. I had set about raiding my pattern stash to find something suitable and when I saw this fabric on Minerva I knew it was perfect and my daughter agreed. This fabric is perfect for transitional pieces like this dress. It definitely says autumn/ winter to me.

Just a day after the fabric arrived, I broke my arm, so over the last 4 weeks, my daughter has made this dress. She’s done all of it, with supervision of course. There was a deadline as she wanted to wear it to the theatre on Tuesday and she is off to uni next week, so it had to be completed. It was done with just an hour to spare!

The pattern is from Burdastyle Magazine 05/2017 and is pattern 112. We lengthened the sleeves to be full length and made the skirt shorter. We cut the size 38, but in retrospect, the 36 would have been a better fit.

Bethan is generally confident with the sewing machine and has made a few small projects over the years, but has never made a dress. This probably wasn’t the easiest of projects for a beginner and it’s not perfectly sewn, there was also rather a lot of unpicking. She handled it really well all things considering. I felt rather frustrated at times, where I wanted to help, but couldn’t.

As with all Burda magazine patterns, the instructions are, well, Burdalike. So we freestyled it. If I had been sewing, this would have been fine, but for Bethan, the order of construction meant there were a few tricky bits and misaligned seams, not helped by the nature of the fabric - it's synthetic, need I say more!

Bethan struggled with the fabric a little as it did fray rather a lot, which meant matching edges was tricky. It’s also easy to get the right and wrong sides mixed up, so we used masking tape to mark the wrong sides.

This sort of design really does benefit from some serious pattern matching, but for a newbie sewist, we didn’t really focus on that too much. Plenty of this design is on the bias, so it’s not a massive detraction if there are some bits that are not perfectly matched and it is still better than most RTW.

I’m not sure if Bethan really enjoyed the process, but she undertook it with determination and can proudly say ‘I made this.’ (and it’s way better than the first garments I ever made). It's already packed into her case ready to take to University next week.