Lace shorts, Burda Style 03-2011-131

Lace shorts have been ubiquitous here.


I've been meaning to make some for my daughter for a year or two now. I even bought some nice sturdy cotton lace yardage about 12 months ago (Pittwater trading), and although I have only the slightest tendency towards keeping up with current fashion, my daughters are much more interested in being in style. I  thought I'd better get around to making this type of garment before the fad disappeared completely from the shops.

The problem was, that I didn't really know how to manage the hems, lining and waistband, so easier projects kept rising to the front of the queue.

I looked at some ready to wear lace shorts.

The RTW available for my viewing were uniformly tacky, poorly made, mostly polyester - and pricey. $80-100 for shorts with raw seams visible through the lace!. This gave me some confidence. Mine could not possibly be worse.


I decided to try underlining with faux Hong Kong seams, as per Laura Lo's tutorial, a method that I had used with some success in a skirt a few years ago. The underlining fabric is a very pale pink imperial batiste.
Underlining shorts though, is not the same as underlining a skirt. That dratted crotch curve! There was a lot of fiddling before the seam width at the centre seam was even throughout the curve and not too obvious through the lace. I must have unpicked it at least five times, and that was before I started working on the zip.....


The pattern, naturally, was one I had tried earlier, an experiment with this project in mind, as usually, shorts in our house require a lot of fitting. This pattern is a very simple style with few pattern pieces, in order to avoid interrupting the lace. Burda Style 03-2011-131 seen previously in cotton twill.


I used a thick elastic, marketed as "elastic waistband" which solved all my waistband concerns other than the actual finishing technique- there's some RTW worthy overlocking there :) Originally, I used an exposed metal zip, but neither my daughter nor I liked the appearance of this, and the shorts were a little loose at the back, so I was able to unpick it and subsitute a lapped zip instead, with a little help from some black bias tape on the underlap edge. The waistband is closed with two buttons and an elastic loop. Fortunately black hair elastics are more readily available than black elastic loop tape
.
The lace fabric had a wide strip of cotton selvage on the edge. I cut out the shorts using this edge as the hem, and trimmed away all the woven selvage before overstitching the lace edge with a very fine zig-zag. This has proven quite a robust hem finish and has even survived being put through the washing machine by mistake. The batiste underlayer is hemmed with a machine embroidery stitch, so there is a pretty finish visible through the lace  -however, in real life, this is one of those sewing secrets visible only to the wearer !
My daughter loves these shorts. I actually finished them a few months ago. Being mostly cotton, they are cool and comfortable to wear, and in fact they have been worn everywhere, from the beach to parties, and I consider them one of my most successful projects despite my initial trepidation about working with lace in a utilitarian garment. Sometimes its good to work outside my comfort zone.

Burda Style 03-2011-131 Easter shorts stashbusting attempt

I've had a lovely time patting all my fabric sorting out my extensive fabric collection and piling all the smaller pieces in a "must use up very soon" section. This is a fabulous idea for reducing the stash, except that sometimes you just end up with even smaller pieces that do not quite fit the "can throw out now" scrap stage. Your fabric size storage and throwing out tolerance may vary, but mine causes these difficulties frequently. It is highly annoying to me that scrappy pieces of fabric somehow take up more space than 2 metres x 150cm of the same substance in a tight roll.
I had a very nice pale purplish pink  bottom-weight cotton from Michael's Fabrics, this being a byproduct of my regular collection of cotton for shirts from this source when they have a cotton bundle sale and the Australian dollar is feeling robust. There was about a yard of fabric, quite useable.

Being rather careless in my stashbusting efforts, I managed to cut out this cute pair of shorts for my daughter from about 60% of it, leaving a possibly useable remainder.

technical drawing http://www.burdafashion.com

The pattern is from Burda Style 03-2011, where the garment appears in a short and a knee length version, 131 and 132. This version is tapered out slightly from the hip, the original being rather straight and tight around the thigh, and given a slightly extended front lap for the waistband. The fitting changes are to slightly deepen the back rise, and to narrow the waist at centre back and at the side seams. To allow for this waist adjustment, I have given the constructed the shorts so that the waistband is sewn to the body before finishing the side and upper centre back seam, which seeing as Burda has left in a centre back seam in the drawing, but not the pattern piece, seems a better order than their sewing instructions suggest.
I left off the pockets, as my daughter does not care for side seam pockets and conveniently felt that welt pockets or a patch pocket would not add to the usefulness nor aesthetic appeal of the shorts (or maybe she wanted to wear them very soon, having brought insufficient warm weather clothing home from Brisbane)

I've used some very small scraps of allegedly Liberty print lawn, pattern Mirabelle, purchased quite some time ago from Fabric.com, and mysteriously missing both the texture of Tana lawn and the Liberty label in the selvage, to line the waistband, the fly, and to bind the seams and hem.
This secret inner detail is very pleasing to me, as even if the fabric has dubious provenance, the print is rather pretty. I used an additional layer of the bottom-weight cotton instead of a commercial interfacing, and stabilized the upper waistline with woven selvage of the same fabric to assist in the prevention of stretch during wear.
I've used a flower machine embroidery stitch for the fly topstitching, and used flower shaped pewter buttons. These sort of details were very pleasing to my daughter when she was 5 or so, and she still puts up with them, she is very kind to her mother.

I am pleased to have this shorts pattern fitted, as I have a few more small pieces of fabric lying about.

To co-ordinate with these new shorts, there is some experimental sewing.
I have some pre shirred fabric, from Pitt Trading, previously used for the bodice of a sundress. This fabric is a fine cotton woven, but acts like a 2 way knit due to the shirring. I traced off a ready to wear knit singlet and sewed it from the shirred fabric, binding the neckline and armscyes with cotton/lycra knit.

The hem, which is unfortunately not pictured due to wanting to display the shorts waistband, has caused great self back patting. Last time I used this fabric, hemming caused considerable time in the crying  thinking chair, as the fabric, being crinkled, stretches out when sewn in a highly annoying and unattractive manner. This time, I cut a thin strip of the cotton lycra knit, and sewed it the to the very edge of the fabric using a narrow 3 step zig zag and a walking foot. The knit rolls up slightly, giving a textural appeal that looks quite deliberate, and also has sufficient recovery to prevent a lettuce effect to the hem, and the zig zag  stitch stops the woven fabric from fraying.
Overall, I feel I have made quite a successful singlet, which is cooler to wear than a similar style of knit top, but still requires no ironing. I felt quite clever about this whole outfit, until I realised that I now possessed about 40cm scrap of cotton herringbone and about 70 cm of shirred white voile, less useable sizes than before I started sewing, and not really reduced the stash volume at all.

I will have to sew more things, how terrible!