The Saggy Bridesmaid

I went with the other two bridesmaids to have our dresses altered last Thursday night, hoping we would have enough time to get them fixed before we all this leave for Byron Bay this weekend. Turns out the alterations were going to be slightly more complicated for me than I had hoped. A reminder that this is how the dress currently looks...

You can see that it is way too big at the top, but it is also about an inch too big around my middle as well. This is what happens when you order your dress from China and you have a strange body shape. The other bridesmaids dresses fit them perfectly (they just wanted to get them taken up a little). We had great difficulty taking my measurements to send to the China manufacturer and so the dress came out a little wonky on me.

My first problem was that when we were taking the measurements we couldn't find my waist. It is supposed to be the smallest part of your torso, but I have absolutely no waist and we couldn't find a place where my body curved in at all. So we then had to google different ways to find the placement of the waist and settled on something about a certain number of inches above the belly button and below breasts or something confusing like that.

Next problem... breasts. We all took our breast measurements (isn't girl time fun...) and then compared the numbers to make sure they all seemed correct. My fellow bridesmaids are a rather chesty bunch and they all screwed their faces up and said 'wha..?' how come your chest measurements are the biggest, when you have the smallest boobs out of all of us? So then I had the pleasure of explaining what back and side fat is to them... More joy.

So, despite my best efforts to send accurate measurements, my dress still needs some major revision. I spoke with the tailor on Thursday night and she kept screwing up her face and couldn't work out what was wrong with it. She said take it in she would have to re-make the entire dress and it would be too costly. Sigh. She put some pins in and said she would do the best she could, but that it would still be too big.

Next the other girls tried their dresses on and it was like the tailor had a light bulb flash up on her face. She asked me to put my dress back on and showed me the problem... Basically the people making the dress had used the same pattern to make all the dresses, but had not made amendments to my dress even though "it is twice as big as the other dresses". So they have essentially made the dress in a size 10 and then added some inches of fabric to the sides and that is why it sits so strangely.

Once again, there is not much she can do about it, but she did take pity on me and added some more pins and promised she would do her best to make it look like the other dresses. So unfortunately my dress is going to look like a bit of a sack on me. I think it would improve if I had a cute little belt to bring me in and give the appearance of a waist (like the pictures below), but the other bridesmaids were not feeling this idea.

The good news is that I now feel absolutely no need to diet because the dress is going to be too big for me anyway... hello carbs, oh how I missed you! Work is a much nicer place with some sugar in the afternoons.