Green Tiwi Princess Dress Refashion

I thought it was time to make another dress instead of a skirt. I decided to try a princess style, making the bust fitted without darts. It would also let me keep the alternating stripes effect. Like this:

Website here.
Essentially the dress will be in five pieces. I would also like to make the skirt fuller than the pattern above, as that is more flattering for me.
I made quite a successful dress some time ago just by pinning two lengths - front and back - of fabric onto the dressmakers manikin. Admittedly, the inside is a bit scrappy, but you can't tell from the outside.
Draping and pinning fabric is a great way to create your own style and fit, but if you start with too much fabric you end up cutting away a lot of small pieces that are less useful than a bigger piece that you could have cut to start off with. Sometimes it's a good idea to make a dummy dress out of calico or a similar fabric first, to make sure your design works.
A starting point is to have an idea of what sort of dress you want:

What length?
Where will the waist sit?
What kind of neckline do you want?
Where will the zip be? (I prefer a back zip)
Where are you wearing this? ie. does it need a certain modesty

With the dress below, the front panel connected to side seams ie. it was a single panel, not lots of wide strips or pattern pieces. I added the shoulder straps onto the original fabric, rather than trying to pin it around my shoulders. I found that it was a bit short for work, which is why I added the lace to the bottom.

I was going to start this princess dress with a blank piece of fabric again, but then someone gave me this dress. And it was princess cut. It's from Tiwi Designs, their Sandpiper bird print.

You can see the curved seam here, which is the princess seam:

It was too small for me on top, and a bit short:

And because it had been made for someone shorter, the pockets were too high:

I started by unpicking the side seams of the dress. And then I pinned and sewed the pockets closed. They were going to be too difficult to remove.

I needed more fabric to add to this dress, and luckily the same kind donor had given me two more green dresses.

They both looked good with the sand piper fabric.

I thought that I could cut from the bottom of both dresses and use the material to lengthen the original, maybe in alternating sections. I also needed to put inserts on both sides to make it big enough for me. Plenty of fabric to work with.

I cut the light green dress open to make my inserts.

A mistake I have made previously has been inserting the side panels before I have shaped the dress. Though this dress has the shape provided by the princess-cut, it was made for someone smaller in the bust than me. So I needed to insert darts to make it fit. This changes the length of the side seams because it folds (ie. removes) fabric. I put it on the dressmakers mannikin to do this.

After that I sewed my side panels in.

Then I put it on the mannikin to see how it had turned out.

Not.... well. At all. It's a sack. A pretty, green sack.
It was disappointing, and I tried pinning it several different ways, trying to make it fit. No luck.

No luck at all. I gave up, chopped the top off, and went to make it into a skirt after all.

The top wasn't quite level, but it was easy to patch the gaps.

Because my clothes are refashioned from existing ones, the inside isn't always very pretty. But I don't mind at all.

I left the zip in, so could either put elastic in still or some darts to make it fit well. I looked at the folds on this skirt when I went to hang it up, and decided that I would try them.