I want­ed to make some­thing spe­cial to wear to my friend’s rehearsal dinner.

Instead of trav­el­ing else­where for fine fabric(s) and spend­ing mon­ey, I tried to find a fab­ric to use from my fab­ric stash.

 After search­ing for some­thing sim­ple and clas­sic, I found some beige silks I bought from Mood Fab­rics in NYC last year. I orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to use the beige silk for a gown. But after using some of the silk for the moth­er of the bride dress, I did­n’t have enough left for a gown. Instead, I decid­ed to use the silk for a skirt and blouse/tank.

Just before the wed­ding, I received the new Bur­da Style mag­a­zine. The recent edi­tion fea­tured guest Ital­ian design­er Alessia Gia­cobi­no (design­er forJo No Fui). I enjoyed read­ing her inter­view and decid­ed to attempt her silk skirt pat­tern (pic­tured above). Her skirt pat­tern was sim­ple yet chic. Bur­da describes the skirt above with this state­ment, “Excite­ment is added to the out­fit by the aus­tere­ly-cut skirt with cou­ture-style volants.”

The silk I used for the skirt looks very sim­i­lar to the silk worn on the Bur­da mod­el in the Bur­da magazine.

I did­n’t have much time to make the gar­ments (nor did I want to spend a lot of time on the gar­ments), but I end­ed up spend­ing more time than I antic­i­pat­ed. The silk for the skirt was very slip­pery and fine. I end­ed up hand stitch­ing the hem and flounce.

If you look close­ly in the pho­to, the flounce (ruf­fle piece draped in front) has serged edges. Orig­i­nal­ly I serged the edges of my flounce, but at the last-minute I did­n’t like how the serg­ing looked. My serged edges did­n’t look fin­ished and clean.

There­fore, I end­ed up rolling the hem and hand stitch­ing the flounce edges. Since I stitched the flounce edges after build­ing the gar­ment, the edges weren’t as clean as they would’ve been.

 Custom Silk Blouse

I used a Bur­da dress pat­tern for my sim­ple silk tank (pat­tern pic­tured above). I cut off the low­er half of this dress.

I have a cou­ple of fin­ished Ukrain­ian embroi­dery pieces around my stu­dio. Orig­i­nal­ly I hand stitched one of the Ukrain­ian embroi­dery pieces to my blouse. Ulti­mate­ly I felt that the linen fab­ric of the embroi­dery piece did­n’t go with the silk, so I seam ripped off the piece. (The embroi­dery made the out­fit look home­made.)

Since I seam ripped off the embroi­dery, I had a lot of beige on. So I end­ed up wear­ing very bright and col­or­ful chunky jew­el­ry for the rehearsal dinner!

Over­all, I was hap­py with the outfit!