Quick Aside
So I'm not entirely certain exactly which functionality of Subclipse you were using in order to create a repo and share a project to it, I'm assuming you created like a file based repo through the eclipse SVN repo view and tried to share and then commit to it. It looks like your problem got solved but I did want to add an answer on here because I ran across this post looking for the answer to this same problem of handling initial commits even just in general with SVN and wanted to offer help to anyone else looking for the help.
Intro
To start off I would recommend not working through an IDE extension like this just for the initial commit as they can miss a lot of the options for handling opening a repo in SVN. I personally really like the command line form of SVN to work with but TortoiseSVN is a good option for a GUI.
Whether you create a local file-based repo or are connecting to an SVN server and you want better control over your first commit in an previously unversioned project here is what I've found as the best general workflow for doing so.
Create the remote folder to save to.
On command line this will be:
$> svn mkdir your-url-scheme://your-site-address.domain/path/to/repo/example-directory
Or on TortoiseSVN open your repo for browsing, right click, and select "create new folder"
This will give you a location in the SVN repo to checkout from for our next step.
Checkout in to the already started project
Make sure to use the empty, newly created folder in your repo to checkout with. SVN does not actually require a folder being checked out to to be empty, which is an important part of what makes it actually very flexible and able to subsume parts of your directory into it fairly easily if used correctly.
Now you will checkout this empty folder into the root folder of your already started project. This will add your project to the working copy of this folder without any commit being made yet. The command is:
$> svn co your-url-scheme://your-site-address.domain/path/to/repo/example-directory /your/projects/root/
"co" standing for checkout. In Tortoise svn you can right click on or in the empty repo folder and select "checkout..." and then select the project root.
Set ignores and commit
Finally, you can easily set your ignores on certain files before adding any other files to the tree using the command:
$> svn propset svn:ignore file-or-directory-to-ignore
And to add all non-ignored directories and files:
$> svn add * --force
The force is technically unnecessary in this case but ensures full recursion. You can also now do all of this in your file explorer if using TortoiseSVN or you can even use your IDE extensions to do this at this point(make sure to ignore all files you need to before mass-adding files for commit), all that's left is to make sure to commit the newly added files to the repo and you're up and running with source control :)
Added this method here simply because this method allows you to avoid any unnecessary copying of those stinky binaries that no one wants to lug around with them.