March madness

Joining Amy in a little crafting challenge, I chose my mad challenge to be: sewing the perfect dress for me!
It will be the first dress I ever sewed. I won't count the dresses for my little cousins, cause they had no shaping at all and where more than just simple.
My biggest problem will be finding a pattern that I truely like and am capable of sewing preferable without having to alter it too much and using stash fabric...

First try: Vintage Burda dress(60's ?)
This is a pretty simple dress though it looks more difficult than it is. Because I would hate to have wasted some gorgeous print fabric and there where only drawings of the dress on the pattern, I sewed a dummy dress today.
Here's the pattern and the main dummy dress parts already cut out. I'm using bomull from Ikea for almost all my test sewing pieces unless the end fabric is stretchy(which hasn't occured yet).

And here's the dummy dress:

Hmm, it actually looks a bit better than in the photos; e.g. no bump on the front. But the pattern asks for two zippers, a long zip on one side and a short zip on the neck back. Plus I think that it would flow better in a fabric with atleast a small percentage of stretchability, something that is not in my stash.
I think I will try another pattern too. I've just brought a sewing mag with a cool Kimono style tunic, shouldn't be too difficult to change it into a dress...I hope.

P.S.: Apart from sewing I started a long term project: a crocheted ripple blanket. They seem to be quite popular at the moment and I just couldn't resist! At the moment I'm using stash yarn and also brought some additional skeins in different colors from this yarn. The yarn is "Torino" from Schachenmayr; 150m/50g and I use a 4mm hook. I had thought about using a thicker yarn, but I don't want the blanket to be too warm as I would not use it then.
That's why I had to chain 274 sts!!! The first row really sucked and took me way over 1,5 hours, but the second one was alot faster already.