Do you every fall in love with someones outfit and then remember that you can sew? A friend of mine often wears a gorgeous white and blue striped jumpsuit to school pickup and every time I saw it I became more convinced it was exactly what my wardrobe was missing. After a while I remembered I could sew and had the classic moment every maker has when you say to yourself – I could make that! And so I did. Today I’m so happy to share with you my favourite Durban jumpsuit!
I honestly never considered stripes for Durban when we were internally testing, or when we were making the samples. It took me seeing a striped jumpsuit on someone else to realise it would be great – isn’t that funny? Has that every happened to you? I’m so grateful for friends with good taste!
After I made myself this Durban and wore it over and over again, I realised we had to have a striped Durban in our final samples. We made our Durban Curve romper in a very similar striped seersucker, and it turned out to be one of my favourite samples ever.
I chose to make the sleeveless wide leg Durban, but with a round neckline, and was really thrilled when i realised we had a lovely deadstock white and blue striped linen/cotton in the studio. I opted for front patch pockets with the stripes alternating direction for a bit of visual interest. Something I am so happy with!
I painstakingly cut out the jumpsuit over a period of days to make sure it was as perfectly pattern matched as possible. And I must admit, i’m pretty happy with it! The buttons are Arrow Mountain Sakura buttons which are honestly worth the extra effort to sew on because they are so so perfect.
Unfortunately when I tried it on I felt very very overwhelmed by the vertical stripes. It felt like a uniform for a correctional facility, which is really not the vibe I was going for. I decided to quickly put together a belt with stripes in the opposite direction to break it up. This was one of those times when a belt makes all the difference – suddenly it was the jumpsuit of my dreams and I was in love!
The one tragedy here is that i was in such a rush to quickly put together the belt that i didn’t pattern match the back seam. So the only seam on this entire garment which didn’t receive incredibly careful pattern matching was the belt, which sits on top of everything and is the first thing you see. Sigh. I’ll probably re-cut it when i have time. Ha who am I kidding, I’m a mum, i never have time ;)
The icing on the cake for me was when I first shared this jumpsuit on Instagram my friend, immediately messaged me that she loved it – which made me giggle, since I had literally copied a jumpsuit I had seen her wearing. We now have plans to wear our jumpsuits at the same time hehe. That cute moment made this whole project feel full circle to me.
So my friends, i really hope you enjoyed reading about my favourite Durban jumpsuit! Have you had any funny experiences copying your friends outfits too?
