Made by a Fabricista: Boucle BBQ Dressy Casual.

There is a ton of boucle at the Fabric Mart site right now!  Every color combo and texture you could imagine.  :-)  I have always loved the look and feel of boucle, but I rarely make things from it, so when faced with my May post, I figured why not take this beautiful and slightly formal fabric and make it into something a little more fun and casual?  When I do outfit of the day posts at my blog, one of my favorite tags to use is "dressy casual," and I was excited to find a way to take this fabric and make a dressy casual kind of look with it!

This fabric appeared briefly at the site before it sold out.  :-)  It is a poly boucle, and though it's hard to tell, it is made from navy blue and burgundy yarns woven together.  It is lined in a stretch nylon (woven) lining (that I WISH Fabric Mart would get more of, this is the best lining material I have ever worked with).  The top is made using Burda 7175, a vintage pattern from the 1960s.  The cover art definitely showcases a lady who wears boucle in a non-casual dressy way.  The shorts are from the April 2016 Burda Magazine, style 106 A.  I love both pieces, but because the shorts fit me perfectly and are super comfortable, I am most enamored with them.  More on both of these individually below.

Together, they give off a vibe of being a set and "just so," but because of the very modern shorts shape and seaming, the two seem that they would not normally go together on their own.  They do, though, work quite nicely together, despite their sartorial differences.  And in my mind, these two together need to be worn to an afternoon summer BBQ party.  So I can at once play a round of croquet and sip a beer.  That's just the kind of outfit this is...

So here's the deal with boucle.  Look at that photo above.  :-)  I barely spent four seconds touching and handling it and it became a ravely mess.  I decided to serge the heck out of the cut edges and that seemed to help.  In fact, I found the serging so easy and beneficial to the process that I decided to serge the entire shorts project, barring the hemming and topstitching portions.  It was so easy I am kind of kicking myself for not fully serging more of my projects from start to finish.  (Once that has been accomplished, I am sure I will desire a coverstitch machine.)

If I do work with boucle in the future (duh, of course!), I will contemplate block fusing the whole thing, especially if it is a more structured item.  These two items were fine to be treated as I did them, but I could see the benefit of a bit more structure than a lining, especially in the blouse.

Of course if I do take on the challenge of the little French jacket, I will just do my best to be a full on couture sewer and engage in the ancient, tried and true methods of tailors of years past, no serger allowed.  ;-)

The serged edges do look quite lovely, and helped maintain the pretty weave as is.  The fabric marked splendidly, btw, I used the Saral brand of transfer papers along with a conventional marking wheel to accomplish this.

Okay back to the garments.  The shorts fit me in the size 42.  I did have to take the waistband in, but that is typical for me with my pear shape.  The shorts were the "pink" pattern of the month for Burda, so it was tremendously easy to trace.  I wish all the ones I liked were the pink patterns, but alas, usually it is the rectangle dress with a weird hem that gets that honor.  I have other shorts of a similar style from Burda that I have traced before, but this one was just enough different, I traced the whole thing rather than using an older one.  I added three inches to the hem since anything shorter would be too short on my 5'8" frame.

Also of note is that I was in Spain when I bought the April issue.  I know just enough Spanish to muddle through the instructions, but because this was so similar to the others I have made, I just winged it, no instructions needed, and it was fine.  My stepmother is from Colombia, so when I handed her the issue I had bought for her, she was thrilled.  She doesn't mind working from the English version, but far prefers the Spanish.  (I actually buy the German version now more than the English...we live very close to a German store and they stock the German Burda, and since I speak enough German, I figure grabbing it locally makes most sense for me.)
 

The top is made from fabric from Fabric Mart and Kwik Sew 2965.

From far away the shorts appear purple, but they are that mix of blue and burgundy.

One thing to note about the pattern is that the pleats are deep and I needed to press them a bit more.  I figured it out after seeing these photos, and by the time I matched up the shorts with the Burda 7175 top, I had pressed them to their proper placement.

I used my sloper pattern from this project to help me find my proper crotch curve in this pattern.  The front matched exactly, which is always nice, but the back needed to be deepened a bit and straightened out through the upper portion.  I am so thrilled that it worked.  I definitely will keep pulling that sloper out every time I need to sew up a pants or shorts pattern.  It is so worth the time and effort to create one.

Not normally a fan of showing off my behind, but you can see why I am thrilled with the results.  Minus a tiny bit of frown lines emanating from my upper hip downwards (maybe I need to take some length out somewhere?), I think the fit is about as post on as you can get.  Woo!  Shorts don't normally fit me so well (dang it!).

I am attempting my best "ladies who lunch" here.  Hee.  With a matching skirt, like the one in the 7175 pattern, this would actually seem like my reality.

The top is a good fit, but the length was too long.  I needed to take up the hem a full inch to get it fit properly.  I could have graded out the seams at the waist to hip from a 12 to a 16, but I didn't know I would have to.  Sigh.  I normally wear a size 10, but this pattern runs a touch small, so if you are a Burda fan, I say size up.  I noticed that even the armscye is a bit small, and even with my normal 1/2" square shoulder adjustment, it was still very snug.  I don't know if I have the desire to buy a new pattern to get the proper adjustments, so I think I will try this again in a stretch fabric or a ponte and shorten it properly at the actual shorten/lengthen lines instead.  This version does fit, but it doesn't feel as comfy as I would like it to.  And that's a shame since it is super cute on.  ;-)

The buttons are from my stash.  Every so often Fabric Mart will get button bundles.  They are amazing, and for $5-15 you get a boatload of buttons.  I have enough buttons that I may never need to buy buttons again.

Anyhow, I hope that some of you will give the dressy casual boucle look a try.  I wore the outfit with the kwik sew top and shorts today to do a whole variety of errands, and I felt great.  I plan to wear the actual full on boucle ensemble to one of my future summer parties soon.

Have a great month, and see you in June!

Dina, My Superfluities.