I really don’t like to call anyone out on their mistakes.  But when it involves taking me for my greenbacks, my preferences change.

Enter BurdaStyle’s Pleated Midi Skirt.  Ain’t she a forest green beaut?

Now after my Naomi, I had serious reservations about sewing another BurdaStyle pattern.  But then I read that an effort was underway to make the BurdaStyle sewing instructions more comprehensible.

Good for you, I thought.  And then I thought about all of the patterns I hesitated to purchase and sew and how my whole sewing life could be turning around.  In short, I drank the Kool-Aid.

And when you drink the Kool-Aid, not only are you tricked into believing you’re getting something of quality (you’re not), you end up with a sugar headache, your mouth is dyed a heinous, ungodly color, and your soul dies a little (i.e. you’ve just been screwed).

I exaggerate.  There’s no such thing as a sugar headache.

So let’s say you bought the Pleated Midi Skirt pattern.  And let’s say it has three pattern pieces: a front, a back, and a pocket.  The front piece is cut twice, the pocket piece is cut four times, and the back is cut once.

Where in this scenario does the instruction, “Fold each skirt back piece,” make sense?  There’s one back piece, which I only need to cut one of so “each”?

Okay . . . whatever.  I won’t dissect every line of these instructions.

Actually, nobody ever in life reads sewing instructions unless they’re from an indie sewing company.  But I’m going to go ahead and roll my eyes at the fact that there are no construction illustrations.

Let’s be honest here.   This pattern is $5.99 . . . for digital files.  I still have to print the pattern pieces.  And if I don’t pay a print shop to do this, I have to assemble the pattern pieces from a mini-ream of 8.5″ x 11″ pages.  $5.99.

At least if I buy a Big Four pattern I can catch it on sale, I get a hard copy, and while the instructions may be equally crappy, (at varying degrees) I get pictures throughout the instructions.

I could probably assemble this pattern with these deficient instructions, but it’s the principle of the thing that prevents me from doing so.  Sewing is supposed to be fun.  It’s not supposed to be a riddle.

So, updated pattern instructions, BurdaStyle?  Yeah . . . you lying heifer!