Can I be a crazy cat lady without owning any cats?

I'm a fan of Gertie's blog for better sewing, and saw her kitty cat dress a few months ago. I wanted, needed a kitty cat dress. Why didn't I have one already!?

Then I was looking for some thread for another project and ran into a cute kitty fabric. Score! I wasn't sure about using it for a garment at first, it's a bit too quilt-y looking on the bolt, but I went for it anyways.

I wanted to use the top from Butterick's B5603, but it just wasn't going to happen. I don't know what in the world to do to patterns to make them fit me without having to go through a thousand iterations of mockups. The top ended up being some odd combination of princess seam pattern pieces and drafting.

Look at this pattern matching. I am so happy I got everything to match up. There's some headless cats sure, but in the horizontal direction, no half cats, no two headed mutants, and they all line up across the pieces.

This dress made me question my sanity more than usual. It's pretty close to impossible to fit a back like this on yourself. The dress doesn't fit on my dressform at all, even at the smallest size, because of the shape of my upper chest/back and shoulders.

I had sewn the zipper in perfectly the first time (since when can I manage that?), put the dress on and... can't zip it. AH! it's too tight. I had to re-do the zip, and made every mistake in the book in the process. I sewed it with the top of one side on the skirt seam instead of the top at one point. How does that even happen?

 I used a bias binding on the arm holes and on the hem. Light colors don't look all that great on me, so I thought adding this would make it stand out from my skin-tone a bit more.There's also horsehair braid on the hem to give it some poof and help it hang in smooth waves, though I am wearing a petticoat in all the photos.

I also added pockets, albeit they are misplaced. They're too far center front because I didn't account for gathering correctly when I added them to the skirt panels (there's 5 panels total). Only the bodice is lined.

Like I said, I was a little iffy on the fabric being wearable at first. It took me a while to decide on the style of dress to make, but I'm pleased with how it turned out.