Burda Style For people who sew

Description

I have a bad habit of collecting wool sweaters. Whenever I see them exorbitantly cheap or free, I just can’t resist. Felted wool sweaters are good for just about anything. Right? You can guess that a couple of yeas of this, and I have quite a stash. They really need used up. So I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a good use for felted wool sweaters. When I saw the cover of the new “Ohio Knitting Mills” book, I knew I had my answer. I needed a sweater dress out of these sweaters. And not any sweater dress, a Mondrian sweater dress.

So I set to work. My first decision was to copy the YSL Mondrian dress instead of the Ohio Mills one – it had fewer pieces. I had always thought the YSL Mondrian dress had no side seams, just the front and back seam, and that the pieces wrapped around. I was disappointed when my research proved me wrong, so I decided that mine wouldn’t have them – the color blocks would just wrap around. Instead of starting from scratch, I chose a sheath dress that I never wore, and decided to cover it. It was gingham, which proved really useful in designing the color blocks — I just drew the design I wanted on. Then I traced each shape onto Wonder Under, and ironed the wonder under to the back of a sweater. Then I steamed each block onto the dress. I had to raise the neck of the dress to more closely resemble the original, but that was easy with a piece of stiff interfacing. After ironing on all the blocks, the Wonder Under proved not quite strong enough to just hold the wool pieces there permanently, so I zig zagged around the edges of each piece. In the process, I had ironed and sewn the zipper shut. A seam ripper and some scissors fixed that right up – good thing felted wool doesn’t ravel! The neck and armholes didn’t turn out looking too great, so I bound them by ironing on more strips of felted sweater.

All in all, the dress used an entire black sweater, two white sweaters, quite a bit of a red sweater, and a small piece of a blue one. Not too bad. But it was begging to have leggings under it — so two more black sweaters, and voila, matching leggings.

I love my new outfit! Thanks to my cute sister-in-law for modeling the dress and all those sweaters in the pics.

Material Notes

Felted Wool Sweaters, gingham shift dress as base.

Categories

Season

Winter

For

Women

Garment Type

Dress

Style

Casual

Material

Other