Making the twist-front dress

After ten months of officially being in my twenties, it's time to prepare for my twenty-first birthday party. I'm planning on having a marquee/garden party and am getting into dreaming up decorations and ideas. To tell the truth I could very easily get carried away.
I have been really into grey recently, grey is my absolute favourite colour. I also really want to wear something pale blue. But I had no idea on a dress style.
After a crazy weekend in Bristol, my housemate-to-be introduced me to the series Girls. I immediately watched all of the episodes and was entranced by the beautiful Marnie's dress in the season 1 finale.

I love how the twist hugs her figure and immediately had to make it. In blue. Or grey.
I started to search for patterns but found nothing similar until I stumbled across a page in Russian  which had the right kind of idea.
Unfortunately Google translate struggled (possibly due to slang or grammar and spelling - who knows. I don't know Russian) but I started to understand how to construct this kind of garment.
Another Google search found me on a blog with the same pattern manipulation idea. After studying these I began to have a good understanding of what they were trying to achieve.
I stared at Marnie's dress a long while, scribbled on reels of baking parchment, and then I understood. The two pieces were vertical, a seam down the skirt centre hidden by draping. A seam from the centre to the hip (with a pocket in Marnie's version it seems) and a seam on the opposite side from the centre to the armhole.
I began sketching drape lines on a basic dress front pattern.

I then cut out the sections of the pattern, spreading them out and overlayed more paper to trace this shape for both sides of the pattern.

I managed to pin the pieces together getting the right shape for the dress. I really wasn't expecting it to work this well! I still wanted to work out some problems with the pattern so repeated this process with those in mind. I wanted less drape in the skirt centre, and less on the very side panels of the waist. I planned to use habotai in the real dress so the drape would be nicer, also as the skirt ends up on the bias it hangs nicely :)

At this point I decided that the style of this dress wasn't quite what I wanted for my party, so I have moved on to the next plan.
I had fun doing this, and am so happy I managed to figure it out - I'll keep the pattern pieces for when my friends start getting married and I need to whip up a dress to wear, I think this would be perfect in a flowery patterned fabric.