Sewing for Other People Part 1

It is ridiculously late for me to be posting about the Christmas presents I made this last year, but I have been a lazy blogger and a lazy seamstress of late and the cold rainy weather is not helping much.

So here, several weeks after Christmas, is the first of the (shamefully) few gifts I made...

I am relatively selfish when it comes to my sewing and rarely make things for other people, but I got it in my head I would make my sister clothes for Christmas. I'm not sure that either project turned out to be something she would actually wear, but she humoured me and said she thought they were cute, so I'm going to believe her for now...

This dress was based on this dress from Modcloth:


>


The basic idea was strapless, dark floral fabric, elastic waist. I used Simplicity 2497 which I have used for it's original intended purpose and as a top. It's a great basic pattern and this is yet another example of an easy variation. I knew that my sis would want the dress on the shorter side (because she is on the shorter side), so I just eliminated the waist band and sewed the top and bottom together. Because the dress is supposed to be fairly blousy, I put elastic in the waistline and she's able to slip it over her head without a zippper (yay!).


So here's the issue; my sister is a bit more busty than I am, so I re-drafted the pattern top piece that I already cut to my size and added 2 inches to the center and a half an inch to each side, so that it matched the "finished" measurements for her bust and kept the blousy look. Apparently however, this has made the neckline too big and it's gaping... Ugh. I think if I take it in a bit on the sides, it might tighten the bust up enough to stop the gaping but I'm not positive it will work. Any thoughts?