Burda #107A 03/2013 – Lace Cardigan

November 18, 2017 by steelyseamstress 6 Comments

I seem to be going a bit mad for Burda patterns at the moment. This will be my fourth Burda make this year. This is quite a turnaround from being a pattern company whose patterns used to fill me with fear, to now having enough confidence to tackle them without a second thought. The pattern I chose this time is a simple cardigan with a V-neck opening. The front is gently gathered, which provides a little more shape to the garment.

I have a small length of lace fabric in my stash, which was a bolt-end. It has been lurking in my stash for a few years, but I was reluctant to use it as I knew it would be a tessellation nightmare trying to figure out how to cut out the required pieces from the fabric I have. But finally I plucked up courage and gave this a go. After I’d traced my pattern I spent quite a while positioning my pattern pieces on the fabric to get the best placement. Ultimately, I decided that I didn’t quite have enough. However, going ahead with 3/4  length sleeves, I would just about be able to make a cardigan. I’m quite happy with the reduced sleeve length given that the cardigan is made from a lace fabric and will purely be used as a light layer in summer or perhaps an evening event (should I be invited to one!)

The construction was relatively simple at the start. It didn’t take long for the body and sleeves to be stitched together. The trickier part was the front. First of all, the front sections have to be gathered. A good while ago I remember using the overlocker to gather, so I got the instruction manual out and tried this out. It essentially requires changing the differential feed and once stitched pulling on the two needle threads to gather the fabric. It worked a treat in getting an even gather.

When I was trying to tame the front band, I got the iron out and starting on a low temperature ironed the fabric. Much to my surprise, the fabric seem quite happy with the heat, so much so that I took a small piece of left-over fabric (there were only small pieces remaining) and wacked the iron up high. The fabric didn’t melt. I had thought this fabric was just a bit of polyester, but I couldn’t believe anything completely synthetic could survive the full heat from the iron. I was now quite intrigued to find out the fibre content of my fabric. I decided to conduct a burn test. Coming from a scientific background, I just love doing experiments and got quite excited about the idea of lighting pieces of fabric! Anyway, I lit a small remnant in the sink and it continued to burn in the sink once the flame was removed. I used this web page as a guide.

I noticed that the smell wasn’t particularly plastic-like, and indeed it smelled quite natural. I put my burned fabric on a plate and got Mister and Master Steely to smell it too. They declared it a non-plastic smell too. Master Steely said it smelled like rice. I suspect the fabric is viscose. Here’s what the guide said about rayon / viscose:

“Rayon keeps burning after the flame is removed, and although it has an odor similar to cotton or paper, it does not have an afterglow.”

There are quite a few of these cardigans posted on the Burda website, take a look here and here for versions in lace. I notice that it also looks great made with jersey as well, like in this version and I expect I will try this out too at some point.