Bits and Pieces #4: Money, my dress obsession, and the Unfortunate Bust Situation

1. Money
I am trying really hard to stick to a budget this year for my crafty stuff. Basically, I am giving myself a set amount per month + anything I earn from my Etsy shop, and that is it. I'd say I was successful so far, but actually it's the 6th January and I've already spent half of my monthly allowance. /o\ Sewing, why must you be such an expensive hobby? That said, half my purchases so far are minor notions I needed for knitting, which I think is probably just as ruinous. Thank goodness I got all the basic needles and some starter yarn for free!

2. Dresses, dresses, dresses

Sureau dress by Deer & Doe

My number one sewing obsession is still dresses. You'd never know it from my actual output, but I don't know, I just LONG to make a dress. About a third of the paper patterns I own are dress patterns. I always look at the dresses first in any pattern magazine. It's the first section I look at on online shops even though I don't even own a single dress due to my Unfortunate Bust Situation (see below). And yet, I have made exactly zero successful dresses, and have had two failures (one of them never made it out of "tunic muslin" status).

At the moment, my obsession is focussed obtaining the Sureau dress pattern from Deer & Doe. It's only recently been released in English as well as French. What grabs me about it is mainly the bodice, which is ruched at the bust and semi-shirtwaist. It's pretty simple, but I can definitely imagine several fabrics I have in stash made up into this dress. My biggest concern is that the pattern's a bit short looking but eh, short is easily fixable. Also, one good thing is that that there's already been a sewalong (in English, although there's also been a French one by the pattern designer). The big question is, would it even suit me? I think it would, but I'm not sure whether I am right.

What is standing between me and sewing a Sureau? To be honest, point 1: my budget. It's €12.80 + €3 p&p. I'm hanging on a few more days to see if I still really want it. I feel like I might want to earmark my next bag sale proceeds for this one.

3. The Unfortunate Bust Situation

Ugh, curse you, excessive boobage. >:( The continuing (behind-the-scenes) travails of my empire waist top have revealed that my delight over making a successful top were premature and, you guessed it, the problem is/was/always will be my bust. One of the things I've bought so far this month was sort of an admission of failure. I picked up an F/G cup bodice sloper from Connie Crawford's online site because I feel like I need help getting to a basic bodice block that works with my gigantor bust. I am not stupid enough to think the sloper will fit straight out the packet, but I figure it's got to be a better starting point than a commercial pattern based on a B-cup model. So, expect to see me work on that a LOT over the next couple of months. I want a darted, shoulder and armhole princess sloper that I can slap onto commercial bodice patterns.

And a magazine comment:

I was really interested to see that MyImage, who just announced their Spring/Summer 2013 magazine would be available later this month, have branched out into plus sizes. The magazine cover says "sizes 46-56" which is a bigger range than either Ottobre or Burda. I wonder whether they've gone the Burda route of special plus size patterns, or the Ottobre route of making 80% of their patterns run all the way up the size range. I also wonder if they've fixed their god-awful translations!