I was so excited when this pattern came out and bought it immediately.  For my fabric I used Amy Butler's Lark Souvenir in Persimmon.  Nothing could go wrong, right?  Beautiful dress pattern, beautiful fabric, I was ready!

Except once again my body is WAY outside the pattern sizings.  My waist fit, but that was it.  The pattern states that it is sized for the average woman: 5'4" with a B or C bust.  My almost 5'9" frame with, well, let's just say 'larger bustline', required a few pattern adjustments.

As always, I first made a muslin as is with no changes.  It was lovely.  The upper waistband hit about mid bust.  The arms gaped in all sorts of lovely directions.  The entire bodice was about 3 inches too short.  And I had no idea how to fix it.  In the instructions, Kay (the designer), mentions that you may have to do a full bust adjustment (FBA) and to just Google it.  I've never done this.  So I follow her directions and looked it up and found loads of tutorials for patterns that have darts.  This dress doesn't have darts.  Wonderful.  I was on a roll at this point.  I eventually found a very well done tutorial at Lazy Stitching.

I ended up adding two inches in the FBA and another inch in length.  My new pattern piece looked nothing like the original.  Here is the original pattern placed on top of the new one...(am I really that big??? I can't believe I am posting this for the world to see.)


 I was playing around with settings on this one.  This is called "vintage".  Do I look vintage-y?

 Here it is from the side.  I didn't realize until I was done that my eye make up was smeared across my cheek.  I spent my day filing what felt like a year of special ed paperwork.  Plus it was rainy all day.  So I'm a hot mess.  And that thing on the floor behind my feet?  It is not a giant spider, it was once a cat toy.