BurdaStyle Pink & Red stitching contest

I entered my first ever stitching contest at the BurdaStyle website (www.burdastyle.com) on Sunday. Very exciting! 🙂 The challenge was being run by Coats and Clark, and it was to make a pink and red outfit, with decorative stitching detail, for a heart disease and breast cancer event. Since I’m a fan of pink, red, good causes, and challenges, naturally enough I decided to go for it.

Also naturally enough, being me, I got the fabric on Friday and made the dress mainly on Sunday, even though the contest finished by midnight Sunday. Oops.

All went well, though. I wandered along to the super-fantastic half-price sale at Arthur Toye, found some bright cherry red fabric with a textured stripe through it, and some dark-pink-and-white gingham that went with it nicely, and got started. Fun!

I drafted up the pattern bodice by myself, basing it on the bodice of a dress I already owned. For the skirt, I used a pattern piece for a retro 1950’s dress pattern I have, but only used 3/4 of the skirt pattern, and gathered it the entire way around the waist instead of following the original design. (In other words, I couldn’t be bothered measuring out the skirt, so modified a pattern I already had access to. Coz drawing out full skirt patterns is somewhat boring – been there, done that before.) I went for a retro 1950’s sundress style look, with a natural waist, full skirt, and fitted bodice. The sash widens out at the bottom, and to meet the decorative stitching requirements, I thread-painted a rabbit on the bottom of one half of the sash, which I reckon kinda ties in with the whole 1950’s pin-up Playboy girl style and colour.

It was quite exciting putting this up on the BurdaStyle website – my very first project! And it was especially exciting getting a couple of nice member comments on it. 🙂 (Thanks, lovely BurdaStyle community!) If you’re curious to see it on a ‘proper’ website, you can check the project out here: http://www.burdastyle.com/projects/pink-red-1950-s-style-dress (And if you like it, feel free to vote on it! 😉 ) I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, actually. The only adjustment I needed to make to the original pattern draft was to lengthen the bodice, which I did on the dress (since I didn’t bother making a muslin to test it) by adding gingham trim at the top, which I was going to do in some form for decoration anyway, so it all worked out rather well. 🙂

As well as an entry into the BurdaStyle contest, this is my February dress for the 12 Months of Dresses project.