a bit of an obsession and some mailbox goodies

Admittedly, I have a lot of sewing patterns.  Easily, over 2 dozen (yay for $1 pattern sales!).  And yet I’ve only used 2 of them to make jammie bottoms and sleep boxers.  The 3 skirts I’ve made, I used my own drafted pattern.  So why oh why did I become so smitten, dare I say obsessed, with finding an out-of-print (OOP) McCalls pattern #5315?  Weirdly enough, I  think it was because OOP M5315 has side bust darts rather than vertical ones.  Plus, the store bought shift dresses and dress shirts I own have side bust darts and the garments fit well.  I also really like how the side bust darts look, they seem more discret   I’m definitely not a busty gal so I thought side bust darts might be more appropriate for my body type.  I have no idea if my theory is valid or not!

You’d think it would be easy to find an in-print dress pattern with side darts.  Not so.  I may have come across one or two dress patterns with with side darts but the pattern envelope started at a size 8 or 10, and I strongly feel that I am a size 6 in commercial patterns.  I do not have the skills to scale down a pattern nor move bust darts. 

You’d also think it would be easy to find an out-of-print pattern online but I had mixed luck with that.  Nothing was listed on etsy.  But a couple of OOP M5315 patterns were actually listed on ebay, but when I contacted all the sellers they admitted that the pattern came from smoking homes so I declined to buy.  So what was I to do?  I didn’t want to do the obvious option of plunking down $20 to buy the pattern for full price + s/h from the McCalls website.  So I decided to upload an image of the pattern envelope for OOP M5315 to my flickr page so all my contacts could see it, and of course I added the picture to a few sewing groups for extra exposure, and in the picture’s caption I asked if anyone had this uncut pattern in their stash and would be willing to swap it for fabric or something.  My jaw dropped when Nikki from flickr sent me a private flickr message and said that yes indeed she had it and was willing to swap it.  Several days later, our swap is complete.  Nikki sent me the pattern and some beautiful fabric scraps too!!!  I’m grateful for the kindness and generous of the online stitchy community.