Burda Style For people who sew

As I mentioned last week my boyfriend & I have recently launched our first collaborative effort together: Dahl & Dane. For the last week we have been burning silk-screens & screen-printing organic t-shirts in our loft at home.
Screen-printing first appeared in a recognizable form in China during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE)! A screen is made of a piece of porous, finely
woven fabric called mesh stretched over a frame of aluminum or wood. Originally human hair then silk was woven into screen mesh, currently most mesh is made of man made materials such as steel, nylon, and polyester. Areas of the screen are blocked off with a non-permeable material to form a stencil, which is a negative of the image to be printed; that is, the open spaces are where the ink will appear. Does anyone out there want to learn how to screen print? Here is a great YouTube tutorial on how to burn a screen. Here is another d.i.y. website with goodsteps to follow.

There are several ways to create a stencil for screen-printing. An early method was to create it by hand in the desired shape, either by cutting the design from a non-porous material and attaching it to the bottom of the screen aka sticker or contact paper), or by painting a negative image directly on the screen with a filler material which became impermeable when it dried.

We use the photo emulsion technique:

1. The original image is created on a transparent overlay such as acetate or tracing paper. The image may be drawn or painted directly on the overlay, photocopied, or printed with a laser printer, as long as the areas to be inked are opaque. A black-and-white negative may also be used (projected on to the screen).

2. The overlay is placed over the emulsion-coated screen, and then exposed with an ultraviolet light source in the 350-420 Nanometer spectrum (we use 150 watt bulbs for 30 minutes, works great!). The UV light passes through the clear areas and create a polymerization (hardening) of the emulsion.

3. The screen is washed off thoroughly. The areas of emulsion that were not exposed to light dissolve and wash away, leaving a negative stencil of the image on the mesh.

We are really excited about what else we can do with screen-printing. I want to make some printed fabric out of drawings…I can’t wait until we have some free time:)

Today we are featuring an entry in the Malissa cocktail dress variation contest. We are featuring this one because it never got its chance to shine in the voting. MJB14’s creation got lost in the internet void and she deserves a chance to show off. Her great creation can be seen above and if you would like more detail please check out her sewing creations. Thanks for submitting MJB14!

For those of us in a pinch only hours or even minutes before heading out to our costume required big Halloween bash, here at Burda Style we came up with one super fast and easy last minute Halloween costume,
Static Cling.


At first we thought this was some great and totally original, hilarious idea, but after only a few minutes of searching the net, we came to realize, hey! This is actually a fairly common idea that we apparently share with many. Who would have ever thought? So, although overall the idea is pretty ridiculous, check out these wacky “Static Cling” Halloween costumes and our very own variation as well.



Check out our BLACK WIDOW SPIDER COSTUME and its HOW TO as well as the STATIC CLING COSTUME and itsHOW TO !

A few of you gave me a much deserved kick up the ‘you know where’ but alas it wasn’t enough for me get anything worth showing done on my jacket. I did do a little work on it but not enough to babble on about here. Sigh. Next week? Should I promise?

I did manage to finish my Kasia skirt and I LOVE it! The waistband was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, so many pieces and easy for them to get mixed up. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out which piece was which after they’d been mixed up. It was quick to sew up otherwise, or it would have been if I hadn’t had trouble with the zipper. I decided to use an invisible zipper but once it was sewn in I couldn’t open it past a particular point. It turns out that one of the teeth was damaged so I had to unpick the whole thing and use a regular zipper. Ugh, I was not happy oh but I am now that it’s all finished. I think this could be one of my favourite patterns at the moment, it fits in all the right places, feels snug enough around my hips and bottom and the high waistband holds in my leftover mummy tummy. I made no alterations to the pattern, there was no need. What more could I ask for? Perfect!

What makes it even better is it cost me nothing but my time to make. The denim was given to me (I have denim coming out mf my ears), the zip was from my stash and the buttons are vintage glass buttons I had found at the thrift store sometime earlier this year. A stash busting garment always makes me smile :) I’d like to say I’m going to make more from this pattern but who knows when I’ll get around to that. If you haven’t already made this skirt then you absolutely must, when you’re done reading here head on over to this page, print out the pattern and get to work.

I have decided to shame myself into getting some of my projects finished. I have started a thread over in the forum where I have listed unfinished and yet to be started sewing projects which I will (hopefully) cross off as i finish them. I will also add projects as they come up. Anyone care to join me? I have this funny idea that it will make me more productive and stop procrastinating although it could all go horribly wrong.

Also, don’t forget about the sewalong for the Laura dress.

The Future Hippie store is a great spot to nab vintage finds. The store is for men and women and features clothes from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. There are choice pieces for any style. Check it and add a little flavor to your fall wardrobe.

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Over the past few years, my friends and family have wised up to the fact that if they want a handmade gift from me at Christmas, they’d better get your orders in a few months early! Right now I’m in the midst of planning a pair of silk pajamas for my good friend Pip, and I thought these might be a good idea for others, too.

Loads of you have already made the lovely ladies’ Jane pajamas but you could also easily adapt Andre as silk boxers for the men in your life, too. Add a Marcel sleepmask or Alice slippers and you’ve got a great gift worth staying under the covers for!

If you’ve never sewn with silk before, it’s not nearly as difficult as it would seem. Silk charmeuse (sometimes called “silk ”http://www.burdastyle.com/sewpedia/show/96">satin") feels ultra luxurious next to the skin and is what a lot of super expensive lingerie manufacturers use. Since it’s a natural fiber, it lets your skin breathe and feels cool in the summer and warm in the winter, too.

You’ll need to use a small microtex sharp needle in your machine to avoid pulled threads, and cutting out slippery fabric can be made easier with some cleverly-placed paper. Once I made the mistake of sewing regular seams on a silk blouse, only to have it fray and unravel everywhere! Eventually I was forced to bias-bind all the seam allowances by hand to save it, but I definitely learned my lesson. Don’t make my mistake – it only takes a few minutes more to sew french seams in silk garments and you’ll end up saving yourself time later!

Does anyone else have any Christmas presents on the go yet?

Ladies, have you ever considered how lucky we are that compared to guys we can wear whatever pleases us, we could take the male jacket pattern of our BurdaStyle website and sew a fantastic jacket for us. In contrast, a guy running around in skirts and dresses is likely to be frowned upon, although some of them really do look fantastic (like my ex- ex- boyfriend who picked me up from high-school one day dressed in a long skirt that a friend of his had designed).

One thing that feminism really has achieved is not only paving the way for women wearing trousers but ridding them from the most uncomfortable clothing etiquette. Until the end of the 19th century, it was next to impossible for women to wear trousers, unless you called yourself George Sands, and were a French aristocrat whose real name was Amandine-Aurore-Lucille Dupin, who attracted much attention wearing male suits and hats and smoking cigars in public. Mind you, the situation was quite different in theaters, where women playing male characters were an erotic attraction for wearing trousers revealing the shapes of their legs. But outside the theater you would have been dressed in rigid corsets, skirts and dresses with undergarments weighing up to 14 pounds! No wonder that the first argument for female trousers, promoted by an American feminist called Amelia Bloomer , was based on concerns of comfort. Alas, her alternative design, ankle-length baggy trousers worn under a knee-long skirt or overcoat, called “bloomers”, were rather unsuccessful, ridiculed in the press and failed to be commonly accepted.

Then came the bike, and with the bike a technical justification to wear trousers, since skirts on bikes caused quite a few accidents (many people would have preferred if women stopped cycling rather than change clothes). In company of a bike, a woman could wear her cycling trousers, but cycling trousers without a bike, forget it!

Etiquette was so stubborn that neither Parisian fashion designers who designed an Arabian style combination of dress and trousers in 1911, nor two World Wars which necessitated women to put on men’s working clothes to replace them in factories, could create the legitimacy for women to wear trousers in public. In fact, it was considered inappropriate for women to wear trousers until the 1960s! Today, women have a choice between trousers and skirts, while men are mostly confined to their trousers, but that is an issue I will write about in a future blog.