One Pattern, Many Options

After having practiced sewing with jerseys in January and February 2020, I kind of felt like a pro. I was ready for new Jersey adventures and was comfortable enough to touch the nicer and more fancy Jersey fabrics I had bought at the Kingdom of Fabrics storehouse.

The first jersey-related Burda Style pattern I wanted to try out was pattern No. 6910 which is a simple shirt or dress with long or short sleeves. I bought three different jersey prints for this purpose: a grey tulip print for the shirt sleeve shirt version, a salmon-colored print with a silver geometric design for a long sleeve shirt, and a light green print with palm leaves. Beautiful prints and it took me quite some time to decide on these specific color options as each of the prints was available in various colors… 🙂

Using Burda Style Pattern for Making Clothes

My very first blog post on this blog was about my childhood and how me growing up in the house of my grandma right next to her sewing room made me love everything related to fabric. So I knew about sewing patterns from early on. In GDR times my grandma used to get the East German sewing magazine ‘Pramo’. Later on after the reunification of German, she received the ‘Burda’ regularly.

Today Burda has a pretty cool (unfortunately in German) online presence. You can purchase single patterns for only a few Euros and download them. And there is an online community where I am honestly not active at all due to a lack of time.

I still buy the Burda magazine sometimes when I am in Germany, but I find it much more convenient to actually purchase the Burda Style pattern as PDF files. I explain in my blog post on my big sewing plans why I prefer them despite them being more expensive. After all one pattern costs more than the whole magazine with many patterns… 🙂

Getting one Pattern to Make three different Pieces

Another really cool thing about downloadable Burda Style patterns is that one pattern often consists of two or more variations of the same basic pattern. I love this as it helps me practice the pattern and the technique needed for making the specific piece of clothing without making the exact same piece several times.  By varying the length of the piece or the sleeves, the look can be slightly different.  

This was also the case for the Burda style pattern No. 6910 which I wanted to start with to explore sewing with jersey further. Burda Style classifies all patterns and this one is considered ‘very simple’. And it really is ‘very simple. Each of the two shirt options and the dress are basically the same: a front and back piece that are gathered together on the sides of the waist and simple raglan sleeves.

I started with the short sleeve grey jersey shirt. It was a perfect fit – not too tight and not too wide. I was very happy with the outcome. But I did a tiny mistake with facing at the neckline. I guess my mind was still a bit set on quilt binding. When I was done with the facing it looked more like I had put a binding along my neckline. 

WTH, how did this happen?

I guess you should not work on too many projects in parallel to avoid such mistakes! 

I cut off my whole ‘neckline binding’ and started over with a proper neck facing. One should not read the instructions too quickly after all. This is why the neckline of the grey shirt is a bit wider than that of the other pieces.

Adding New Jersey Pieces to my Wardrobe

After fixing this little neckline issue of the short sleeve jersey shirt, I quickly cut the fabric for the long sleeve shirt and the dress.

The long-sleeve version is my favorite of the three pieces. I would even say it is now one of my favorite pieces in general. This salmon-colored jersey is a bit heavier and feels very nice on the skin. Should I move back into a cold country, I would definitely make a few more of these shirts in other colors.

I also like the dress, but it is not really a dress that can be worn very often in Qatar. It is definitely not ‘office compatible’ for a conservative country like Qatar and during this year’s Covid-19 lockdown, I did not really leave the house a lot to spend time outside. Thus, I did not really have a lot of options to actually wear this dress other than at home.

And you, dear reader? Which of the three options do you prefer? Which would you recommend I sew in another print again?