Finished Project: BWOF White Flowery Tunic

This is Tunic 108 from July 2008 of Burda Magazine.

I decided on this top after finding this white flowery fabric at Dressew. It's cotton and not linen as they suggest, but the flowery print reminded me of the one from the magazine, in a lighter version.

It took me a ridiculous amount of time to make this top, considering the simple design.
But first of all, sewing curvy pieces together turned out to quite tricky. Talk about crazy puckering and folded bits of fabric getting caught in the seam when they're not supposed to. Of course it's only after I finished sewing it that I received my copy of Fit for Real People and happened to open the book on the page with their tips on sewing pieces with opposite curves together. By then I'd already unsewn and resewn the pieces about 3 times to finally have something close to perfect.

So FYI (although I'm sure everybody already knows that), the secret to sewing opposite curves together is to do a staystich along the seamline of the inside curve, then clip the seam allowance of that piece. The two pieces will then be easy to align and sew in place....

Aside from that, the rest of the making was in fact really easy. I decided not to include the pockets. For one thing, they felt kind of awkward, positioned at the side seam, and plus my fabric being somewhat sheer, I didn't want them to be visible from the outside. So out with the pockets.

I downgraded the pattern to a size 36 when I traced it as the smallest one was a 38, then took a little in at the waist and hips as I usually do on Burda patterns.

I finished the side seam allowance as well as the sleeve hemlines with bias tape (see my detailed post here). I also sewed bias tape to the back seam allowance, since it included the zipper. By the way, Burda suggests a 60cm invisible zipper, which in my opinion is way too long. The design is both for a top and a dress, so 60 cm might make sense for the dress, but for the top, 45-50cm zipper is enough.

I am quite pleased with the result, although there are some puckering here and there, but I can live with that. I am happy I was actually able to adjust the fit well enough without losing some of the ease and making the garment uncomfortable to wear, as the fabric doesn't have any stretch.



However I am not sure about the fabric choice in terms of color. It is a bit sheer, which means the seam allowances are visible from the outside (also a reason why I wanted them neat and clean lines). Also It's not an overly exciting fabric, even with the subtle flowery detail.

After taking the photos, it looked even more dull to me, especially so white in the bright sunlight, but I think with a necklace and this denim vest that I had it makes it a bit less boring...
If I were to use this pattern again, I would probably go for the whole dress length and maybe would use the collar yoke to do some color blocking and make it more interesting. But overall, it is a light and breezy top, comfortable for summer.