An exercise in frustration

So for the last couple of days I've been working on a project which has since come to a screeching halt. A while ago I found a piece of fabric that I loved but had no idea what to do with.  It's a heavy cotton material, definitely a bottom weight,  a deep red colour with big paisley designs all over.

I was originally thinking of making a new pair of pants, but the likelihood of me wearing a pair of red paisley pants is pretty low, and its very rare for me to wear skirts at all, so in the end I decided I would have to make a dress. I do need a winter weight, long sleeve dress and I figured that the paisley pattern of the material would work nicely as a 70s mod style dress.

I went through my meagre stash of patterns, most of which have been liberated from my mums sewing pattern stash, and found 2 patterns that were similar in style to what i wanted.

I was looking for a dress with the sleeves and neckline of the dress in pattern 1 with the shape and length of the dress in pattern 2. Unfortunately both patterns were in size 12 only, and...well.... I'm not.  In fact I'm not any size, I'm short (just 5'1"), with a big bust (DD or above depending on my weight at the moment),  but a small under bust measurement and just about no torso its so short,  in short no pattern is ever going to fit without a lot of tweaking, so I decided that it was about time I bit the bullet and made a sloper.

After much research and web browsing, I found madalynne's website and was able to follow her tutorial to create front and back bodice slopers.  The back worked perfectly first go, but I had a few issues with the front and needed to make a few modifications to her instructions, but after much fussing around and re-measuring I managed to get it to work.  I then extended the sloper into a simple A-line dress pattern. After making a basic muslin I found that, due to the size of my bust the bust dart was very large,  and was in slightly the wrong position so I  redid the sloper to position the under bust dart properly, then pivoted half the dart around to the underarm, so there's now two bust darts.  The sleeveless muslin was now sitting quite nicely, but I wanted this to be a winter dress so it was back to the drawing board to create  a sleeve sloper.  I wasn't happy with the way the sleeve head came out using Madalynne's method so after more research I lowered the sleeve head a bit and redrafted the curves based on the shape of the arm scythe, until I was happy. A quick muslin and ta-da, dress pattern complete.

It wasn't until my material was pressed and layed out on my dining room table ready to start cutting, that I hit a snag.  The placement of the pattern on the material. No matter which way I turned it, where I layed my pattern, I could not come up with one layout that didn't end up with a great big oval over my belly, or a uterus shaped paisley design right over...well my uterus.

Now I'm generally really unobservant when it comes to pattern placement, and usually need to have things like that pointed out to me, so if its so glaringly obvious even to me well, No thank you.  So I'm back where I started, only this time not only do I need to find something to do with the red paisley fabric, but now I've got to find some new material to make up the new pattern I created.

I decided to take a break for a while and instead attempted once again to tidy up my stash of fabric, with the hopes of finding something else that I can use to make the dress.  4 huge boxes of fabric later and still nothing.  I can't believe that among all that material there is not one piece that I could use to make this dress.  Well it looks like another trip to the fabric store is in order.  Why do these things always occur just after I've made the promise to myself to buy no new material until I've used up at least half the stash that I currently own?