The making of the Burdastyle Panel Dress

Dear readers, one of the projects I was working on in the last couple of weeks was the Burdastyle Panel dress, and so, here it is.

I guest blogged about it on Burdastyle, and if you check out my planning post and the finished dress report you will find some tips and techniques you may want to use in your projects as well.
It is a couture version of the dress, but I don't claim that it is the only way to make it - I made decisions I thought were right for this particular project. If you have questions why I did something the way I did, please ask - I will be happy to explain. And do suggest a different way to handle things I would love to know how you do it!

One of the readers asked me about seam finishes - here:

The question was: "When you clip the seam allowances to allow for curves, do you always round them?"

There are two reasons why I round seam allowances:

• It is easier to catch stitch around the clipped corners if they are rounded and not sharp. 
• The seam lies really flat and looks neat. 

This is the larger image of the stitched curve. I must admit I got carried away with the curves, but you get the idea, right? 

I made it following Susan Khalje's great tips on stitching curved seams:

• I recommend staystitching both sides of the curved seams, and then clipping any U-shaped (concave) curves, to allow you to fan them out and shape them to the corresponding seamline (the convex curves). The staystitching will help keep the seamlines from getting out of shape. Handle them carefully – with all of those curves and varying degrees of off-grain seamlines, you don’t want any distortion! 
• Give yourself lots of matchpoints, every inch or two, just to make sure everything lines up as it should. 
• Baste the curved seams, of course – basting will hold them better than any amount of pins, plus you’ll be able to use both hands to control the fabric as you stitch, without having to constantly stop to take out pins as you go along.
• Once you’re happy with stitching and take out the basting, then you can press the seams carefully and catch stitch the seam allowances to the underlining.

If you wonder, I did put a lot of matchpoints in muslin stage and transferred them over to the linen pieces.

Linen behaved relatively well, I must say, but I could see that without match points the panels would have stretched and shifted. 

On this image, besides match points on the muslin, you can actually see how I used the shell muslin to cut front lining. Burdastyle didn't recommend using lining, which I thought was strange because linen can be relatively sheer. So, I did make lining, matching the front panel seams as long as they lied flat, with darts forming above the bust point.  This saved a lot of time and worked beautifully - no curved panel on the lining, just two darts. 

That's it for the dress. Again, there are many images on Burdastyle, so check out the two posts - the links are at the beginning of this post. And, by the way, I did enter this dress for the PatternReview Natural Fiber Contest, go check it out - there are quite a few lovely creations in the contest gallery!

Have you made anything from the recent Burdastyle releases, magazine or website? Please, share your projects here if you did!