New Retro Looking Dress

Background
I bought the fabric for the dress at my local thrift store a couple of years ago. It was clearly vintage - based on the width and the design. I'm pretty sure 1950's. The design is of St. Mark's Square in Venice with Venice written under it. The colors are mostly natural, black, peach, and teal. I knew I wanted to make a retro looking dress with it but only recently decided on a pattern. The fabric itself is perfect for where I'm going this weekend - the Venetian in Vegas. :-)

The Process

I cut out McCall's M6959:

I went with the main dress view which is a nice, simple, wrap dress - or so I hoped. It wasn't. I cut out everything, tried the dress on before wrapping bias tape all around the edges and...the way the front is cut is completely wonky. It fit perfectly at the waist but there is no way in any sort of Universe that the front bodice could fit over even a cup A, let alone my two lumps of fat I have permanently stuck above my lungs. Yes, it has darts, but the way the opening was....that just wasn't going to happen. And the darts? They ended up almost under my arms...despite the waist fitting perfectly. o_0?

The bodice side seams and the skirt seams will not match up. Don't even try. It's not worth it. The shoulders are for a linebacker. I have no idea why anyone would need that much space on their shoulders without using shoulder pads. ....So I recut the back slightly to redo the shoulders and lower the back neckline. The front I had to completely recut. I moved the dart to where it should be, redesigned the front edge so it would cover my chest, and recut the shoulders on the front. Once I had the front edge where I wanted, I added the three packages of black bias tape all around the edges. Add it to the sleeve edge before you fully sew on the sleeve so it has a nice and neat edge.

I also added a ribbon fluffy thing to the front over of the dress. It needed something there. Here are the pictures of the final dress on the dress dummy. If I do the dress again, the only other thing I'd change is to make the waist another another 1" lower.