The Long Story of a Short Skirt

Several weeks ago Elaray decided to prune her collection of Burda magazines and give away the issues from 2004 to 2005 to Burda virgins, among whom I number myself. I supplied my address and Elaray generously sent me the patterns and instructions from August 2004. Thank you very much, Elaray!



The material Elaray sent me is in English; the pic above comes from a Russian archive of back issues.

What with this and that I hadn't gotten round to trying the rather intimidating Burda experience, when DD came home from graduate school for spring break and asked me to make her something. I told her to pick something from Burda 8/04, and she chose a little double skirt. She picked out some gauzy chiffony stuff for it at JoAnne--black underskirt and sort of a marbled (or scrappled) grey, black and off-white overskirt.



The skirt turned out OK, I think, despite the two layers of gauze being less than delightful to work with. DD seemed pleased and she is very persnickety! She wanted to grab the skirt off the sewing machine and run back to school, but she agreed to pose for the historical record first:



This project included my first invisible zipper of the milennium, successfully inserted despite my efforts to follow three different sets of directions for it! What I did not succeed in doing, however, was tracing a Burda pattern, which was the point of the exercise. This instructions for this particular garment called for measuring and plotting a circle on pattern paper, but no tracing. So I guess I'm still a Burda virgin!

Oh, and on the me-made-March front, I used the fabric remaining from the overskirt (plus a mile and a half of narrow rolled serging) to make a nice scarf which I will drape around my neck when the fray-check is dry.