What would I Iike to be sewing? Simplicity 5424

Last time my Dad came to visit, he brought me this wonderful herringbone tweed:

Its hard to see from the photo but its a brown and cream tweed with some little flecks of autumnal colours running through it.  My Dad appears to live in a fabric tardis, it's this old family house and generations of the family have been buying fabric for things and when my Dad turns something up in a drawer, he donates it to me.  I'm definitely not complaining, especially when the donation in question is this lovely tweed.

The Simplicity 5424 dress has been on my to make list for ages and I really need some more warm, winter appropriate clothes.  So this is what my lovely tweed is destined for (I know tweed is not a conventional choice for a dress but I'm hoping I can get away with it as its not a very heavy tweed).

I have a stash of 1970s patterns which were given to me by a friend of my mums who used to make lots of her clothes in the 70s and was roughly my size. She clearly had a similar style to me as well because I love almost all of them, how lucky am I?  I used one to make my parasols in the park dress in the summer.  Definitely I think some more will appear on here. 

I do have one question though.  Were people in the 70s really short or was it just appropriate to have A LOT of your legs on show?  I measured this twice and it seemed like it might be a fairly short  but decent dress on me but having made 1970s dresses before I have added 7cm to the pattern.  This made my skirt pieces look really long but better that than a dress I can't wear later.

All my pieces are now cut out and good to go but sadly they are probably going to stay like this for weeks as Christmas is coming up scarily fast and I have a ton of Christmas stitching to do.  I'm sewing like a total obsessive and I can't blog about any of it yet as that would be a massive spoiler.  Watch out for the gift posts following Christmas!

Talking of Christmas presents, has everyone seen the AMAZING giveaway on Tilly's blog.  How wonderful would it be to win this?  Go and get entering. 

I'm off to go ice skating now, stuff the Christmas presents.  Happy pre-Christmas celebrating people!