Burdastyle (former Burda magazine) used to have such brilliant workout/lounge wear patterns. I haven’t seen as much of these in the last few years though. But admittedly I don’t check out every issue. This pattern is from nr 11/2008. The same issue has this this top that I made last year. And I will probably make this hoodie in the future. Instead of regular strings, I used twill tape that I attached to a wide elastic. I love this method and use it all the time, I just wish that I could find the photos that I thought I had taken. Oh well, I will save it for a tutorial later on.
The fabric is stretchy cotton/lycra ribbing. I buy this fabric from Danish vendor Stoff & Stil and the quality is really good, I know this since I used the same fabric for my yoga pants a few years back, and those pants still look great. However, probably due to all this roller derby stuff, I seem to have slimmed down quite a bit in the waist area and the fold over waist doesn’t stay up anymore.
The pattern calls for a lot of top stitching, which is basically what makes the pants special. Always a scary proposition when working with knits. I do have a coverlock function on my serger, but while the the double cover seam is great for hems, I find it nearly impossible to use for curved seams, and the single cover/chain stitch seems a little unsturdy. So instead I used regular machine straight stitching, with two threads in the upper looper. This was a bit of gamble since the fabric is very stretchy. It seems to work though, I did try top stitching the leg seams as well, as the pattern calls for, but that made the seams all wobbly and stretched out. The second downside of using a super stretchy fabric was the eyelets. I did interface the back of the fabric, but one eyelet still popped and needs to be reattached. My mistake was using a stretch fusible. Next time I will go for a stiff interfacing.
I do hope Burda will make more designs like this. I love making my own workout wear and Burdastyles’s patterns often has more fashion forward details than Jalie and Kwik-Sew.
