Operation Xmas Dress, Part 1 - The Pattern

Last December I wanted to make a Christmas dress.  There was no exact pattern in mind, just hazy thoughts of something with a V neck, sleeves and a full skirt.  Oh and it had to be green, soft forest green.  Crazy right? You'd think little miss "red is a neutral" would be all over a bright red dress. Seems my subconscious wanted something a little different.

The dress didn't happen last year because the whole house got some sort of horrible chest cold right at the beginning of December. Merry Christmas! Hope you didn't need that lung. I spent most of December in a zombie state of sickness until finally going to the doctor to beg antibiotics.  (Side Note - Middle aged male doctors who act like you're being dramatic about a "slight chest cold" can suck it.) Annnnyway, once the drugs kicked in there was only time to whip together a quick knit dress for the 25th. Any disappointment I might have felt was negated by finally being able to lay down horizontally without going into a 10 minute coughing spasm. Thank you modern medicine.

I thought the green Christmas dress was one of those passing sewing fancies that would dissipate after the hard deadline had passed. Don't know about you, but that sort of thing happens all the time around here. Must be some weird deadline induced creatively left over from college.  However the green Christmas dress did not go away. It danced around my brain on a regular basis, a riddle that had to be solved.  The basic bones of what I wanted in the garment were still the same, V neck, sleeves, full skirt.  But nailing down an actual pattern continued to be difficult. Several options and hacks were considered, but they all felt wrong. In fact I had that annoying sensation that I'd "know the pattern when I saw it." That's great intuition, but where the heck is a girl supposed to look after tossing the stash and surfing the web?   Then late November I was browsing vintage patterns on Etsy and I SAW IT!

BAM - McCall's 9572. V-neck? Check.  Sleeve? Check. Full Skirt? Check.  Add simple looking to sew, but still elegant. Check, check, CHECK! I was also lucky this pattern wasn't one of those wildly popular vintage designs and thus had the very affordable price tag 15 bucks. Heck I buy new patterns more expensive then that. So everything was coming up Heather except for one slight snag, the pattern wasn't my size.

Yes my sewing friends, this particular pattern was a size 14.  My vintage size hovers in the 18-20 range, depending on the manufacturer. The body measurements for the dress are  Bust - 32, Waist 26.5, Hip - 35, a full 4 inches smaller than any of my measurements. A quick search of the pattern number showed that this was the largest size available for purchase. If I was going to make this dress than I was gonna have to grade it up. So I bought the pattern and graded it up, but that is a story for another day.