Betty dress, or ARGH

I've had the Betty pattern for ages. I bought it intending to make a dress out of the cotton that eventually became my orange circle skirt, but there wasn't quite enough (having made this version, I think there probably was enough and I was doing it wrong), so it just sat there. Until a couple of months ago, when Sew Over It released an expansion pack with new necklines and sleeves. Sleeves! I bought it, picked up four metres of red cotton viscose-y stuff from Walthamstow Market, and set to work. This shape isn't so much my shape these days, but it was £8 for a trial run and I thought that if it worked, the Betty bodice might be a good one to Frankenstein onto less fabric-hungry skirts.

Long story short, it was a fail, but I think for the sake of my own learning it's important for me to document my failures as well as my successes.

Looks OK, right? Well, there are multiple problems with it.

a) Where the hell am I going to wear this? It's appropriate for literally none of things I regularly do.
b) I'm not sure why I decided I had to make it up as is for a first go, because I don't actually want a massive floofy circle skirt dress and I already knew that.
c) It's not me. At all. I want to be wearing more red, and this is a nice print, but made up like this it's just overwhelming.
d) It's not actually sewn up under the arms.

Yep.

I've used a lot of Sew Over It patterns with minimal problems, so I assumed that once I'd done the full bust adjustment everything would be fine, but I tried the dress on about 90% of the way through construction and realised I couldn't lift my arms. The sleeves were way too tight - not a problem I'd ever had with their patterns before - and the old Extendo-Boob situation was happening around the armpits. I've stood in a changing room many a time looking at a pretty dress and wondering whether I could live with the restricted arm movement (generally I would buy the dress and it would sit in the wardrobe until I threw it out two years later) and I was determined not to do that again. I felt quite virtuous about my decision to try and fix it, without really confronting the bald fact that I have no idea how one fixes something like this.

The dress sat on my table for a while as I considered my options. I didn't have enough fabric left to do any recutting, but I did have a few remnants I could piece into the underarms. Was that a thing? Would that work? How would I go about it? Would it look ridiculous? Was that even the right adjustment? The sleeve was definitely too small at the upper arm, but when disconnected from the sleeve the bodice fit me perfectly well, so putting extra fabric in there probably wasn't the best idea. I went back and forth on this for ages, before coming to the conclusion that actually, it didn't really matter. Because I am never going to wear this dress. It's a nice idea and a nice colour, but a long-sleeved full circle skirt dress? It's got no place whatsoever in my wardrobe and even if I did manage to fix it, all it would do is take up space and gather dust. I took these photos for posterity, rescued the zip and put the fabric in my recycling bag.

Honesty is all well and good, but active learning would be better. What I'd really like to do now is pick up some cheap fabric, make a couple of toiles of this bodice and see if I can get it to fit. If I can work out how to alter it for my shape it'll do my skills a lot of good, I think.

Bye, Betty dress. You were not for me.