I Am Almost There

Robin sent a link to this compelling (if you're me) eBay auction where you can get FIVE (count 'em, FIVE) shirt/bag/skirt sets for an opening bid of $9.99.










(That's four; the last one is just "eh" so I'll let you click through to the eBay auction to see it.)

I am so intrigued by this, because I can totally see myself headed down this road. I already have shoes that match a dress and a skirt -- and by "match" I mean THEY ARE THE SAME LIBERTY PRINT -- plus I color-coordinate my watchband with my sneakers, and so on and so forth. And in the summer I pretty much wear the same uniform of A-line skirt, polo shirt, and loafers or Jack Purcells EVERY DAY. So it's only a matter of time before I indulge in the complete Garanimals-for-Grownups experience, right?

The seller mentions that all these outfits belonged to her aunt. (I would like to point out that although I am an aunt, none of my nieflings are, as yet, literate enough to write an eBay listing. So I have time.)

I just love the idea of waking up every morning and pulling a complete outfit out of the closet. I'm assuming she hung each outfit on a single hanger. (And also in my little fantasy world, the woman who owned these wore them with matching Keds.) Neighbors would know what day of the week it was by whether she was in the green thistle set or the pink one (Penguin Fridays?).

It's totally obvious I've thought WAY too much about this ... as I said, I'm almost there ...

Ideas I Am Going To Steal

Eirlys sent me this fantastic Etsy skirt, by deciduoussoul:




I love this skirt, but I don't wear wrap skirts (that is, I haven't worn a wrap skirt since about 1977) so I have put this on my list of cool ideas to steal someday. Banding alphabet fabric (of which I have a gracious plenty) at the bottom of a plain A-line skirt? Genius.

Ktbb sent this link, in a comment a few days back:



I've done rickrack on skirt hems before, but not on midriff bands. I think I see a Duro Jr with this effect coming up ...

And Lisa sent a link to this eBay auction for a terrific rocketship sundress ... the dress itself is a bit banged up, but the fabric is so darned great I see another Spoonflower order in my future:




I don't feel bad about this at all -- we get inspiration from everywhere, and there's a bright line between inspiration and slavish imitation. (I was going to throw in the Picasso quote "All art is theft" here, but I've looked that up in both the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (and the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, just in case) and in the new Yale Book of Quotations, and can't find it. So I'll just have to steal without the glamour of Picasso having said it was okay.)

What good ideas have you wanted to steal lately?

Rant: I See London, I See France

So a couple weeks ago I went roller-skating, on the spur of the moment, in [location redacted]. I went straight from work, so (as is my wont) I was wearing a full skirt and a cardigan sweater.

I get my skates (rentals, and they carved up my ankles something tragic, I'm still sporting band-aids), lace 'em up, and am about to hit the floor, when this Creepy Guy intercepts me.

"I am so sorry for coming up to you like this," said Creepy Guy, and for a minute I thought he meant "on Rollerblades," because, as you all know, I am an old-school quad-skate SNOB, but no -- he continued -- "I just had to say how BRAVE you are. I've never seen anyone skate in a skirt!"

I was, of course, gobsmacked (as I always am when people are bogglesomely rude and/or clueless), but all I could think of to say was "What do you think people did before 1955?" and fix him with my best Withering Look before I skated away.

But the whole thing really cheesed me off. (Obviously, or I would have titled this post "Musings:" or "Prolegomena:")

First of all, skating in a skirt is not "brave". Rescuing children from burning buildings is brave; wearing a skirt is ... wearing a skirt.

So Creepy Guy (who was also wearing one of those arm holders for his iPod, which ALSO pissed me off, because if you are skating at a rink you should do the DJ the courtesy of listening to what he's spinning, even if he IS making Slurpees at the snack bar at the same time) was calling me brave because -- as far as I could tell -- there was a chance I might FALL and THUS: someone might, possibly, theoretically SEE MY UNDERWEAR.

OH NOES!

C'mon, people, are we all six years old?

Let us first admit that all of us know that most people wear underwear. We know this because when people do NOT wear underwear, it is a cause for comment. There are slang terms ("Going commando," etc.) for not wearing underwear; I have not heard any for wearing underwear. Thus not wearing underwear is the marked case.

Let us next admit that most people wear underwear that is, at minimum, the same coverage as a relatively modest bathing suit. How do we know this? A quick investigation of any mass-market store (e.g. Target) shows that the ratio of "bikini," "hipster," or "brief" styles of women's underwear stocked is roughly double the amount of thong underwear stocked (by number, not volume, obviously). Retailers stock items in proportion to their sales.

Given this knowledge, and the knowledge that thong underwear's most typical use case is to avoid a visible panty line, added to the evidence of a FULL SKIRT (= no panty line) we can posit that most people wearing full skirts are most likely not wearing thong underwear. (They may not be wearing granny panties, but they are probably wearing something that could be categorized as "great-aunt panties.")

We also know that these things exist: boy shorts, bike shorts, "shapers" etc., etc. So there are many more types of underwear that do not allow for indecent exposure than there are those that DO.

NOT TO MENTION (as I mention it) that a SIGNIFICANT portion of the women skating in jeans were displaying a "whale tail," which is (as I'm sure you know) the phenomenon where a large portion of the back and sides of a pair of thong underwear is visible above the back waistband of a pair of pants (usually low-riding jeans). And more than a few of the male patrons had visible boxer-shorts waistbands displayed above the waistbands of their pants.

So the ratio of underwear (not counting visible bra straps) displayed by pants-wearing patrons to the underwear displayed by skirt-wearing patrons was something on the order of, oh, I dunno, INFINITE. (I would make a Riemann sphere joke here if I knew anything about the Riemann sphere.)

Given all this, then, could we please lay off the "OMG!!!! Someone might SEE YOUR UNDERWEAR!!!" hand-wringing directed at us skirt- and dress-wearers? I know it's too much to ask the Creepy Guys of the world to cut it out (because if they were self-aware enough to know not to say stuff like this they would not, in fact, be creepy), but, seriously, people. We can wear skirts and dresses and participate in all sorts of normal activities, such as climbing up stepladders, crawling under desks to swap cables, riding bicycles, carrying boxes (up to 70 lbs), and, yes, even go roller-skating.

(I think this was a different rant than the one commenters on yesterday's post were expecting ... sorry about that. I promise to rant about actual makes and models of underwear in some future post.)

Exercising: Some Options

Although I often declare that I am not athletic, the evidence probably wouldn't acquit me of that charge. Since junior high I have committed the following sports and/or exercise activities: cross-country running (very slowly), throwing the discus and shotput (ineptly), playing soccer, both high-school indoor (hello, knee damage!) and college outdoor (position: benchwarmer), step aerobics (lots of fun but requires suspension of natural sense of the ridiculous), yoga (Iyengar, most fun ever, but really only with one specific teacher [YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE]), treadmill walking [only supportable by viewing of Dr. Who and Torchwood]. Oh, and weightlifting, either intermittently or concurrently with any or all of the above.

And, of course, roller-skating, although anything done in a venue where you can also buy a corn dog is automatically suspect as exercise.

My biggest problem with exercise, of course, has always been the general crappitude of exercise WEAR. Tight pants? Tighter tops? After a certain age, a "Don't Mess With Texas" t-shirt and raggedy soccer shorts just don't cut it.

And then came these folks. They sent me an email and I grudgingly took a look at their site, but the grudging turned to grudging admiration. This skirt is GREEN! It has workout shorts under it! It has TWO pockets. It has something called "tummy-tuck" technology. And the best part? The style name is "Rollergirl."

I don't like the logo (I don't like ANY logos) but hey, nothing's PERFECT.

I'm seriously tempted to get one of these; the weather's getting better, I could use more exercise, my outdoor roller skates have just been gathering dust ... and this would solve my "what can I wear skating in the Skokie Sculpture Park and not feel like a very conspicuous idiot in the grocery store on the way home?" problem.

And if I got the black one maybe I'd even feel up to skating in Central Park. Certainly more up to it than skating in street clothes or in the ubiquitous (and too-tight) black lycra capri pants. You never know ...

The skirt's $56, click on the image to visit their site. Their size chart goes up to XXL (22), but it looks like this skirt is only up to XL (about an 18).

So Wrong It's Right

Okay. Admit it. You would love to have one of these skirts, right? I'd wear mine to scare small children into behaving (and to make offhand vagina dentata jokes). Wouldn't you?

Even better, the eyes are POCKETS. Yep, you can put your hands in there and direct your skirt's monstrous gaze all about the room.

Of course, this skirt (designed by JC de Castelbajac, and boy, I'd love to hang out with him, he sounds like a fun guy) is £375. Yep, that's right, nearly $800 bucks. The site (click on the image to visit it) suggests that it should be worn right below the bust, so that the fullest part of the skirt is at your hips (although they didn't show it on the mannequin that way).

I don't think that they went far enough, though. Why not make this in shaggy fake fur? Preferably green or pink? And then if anyone ever asked you where you got it, you could say, "Well, first I had to shoot a Muppet ..."

(Thanks so much to Robin for sending this ...)


And, in today's shameless begging for money for homeless women veterans, I thought about writing a drabble around this skirt, but it would just be "NOM NOM NOM" a hundred times ... and of course I STILL cannot figure out what happened with that darn Paypal button. Obviously, Paypal hates me and all my works, but if you still want to donate via Paypal, you can use the email address on this page ... and because of some "off-widget" donations, we're really at $1382 (not $1220) right now! That's less than $125 to go!

and here's the link directly to the ChangingThePresent page ... Thank you!

Oh, and for those of you asking if there's going to be a Secret Lives of Dresses *book*, not just the drabbles and the daybook, the plan right now is that it's going to be a real, live NOVEL. Srsly. I can't say anything more without jinxing it (and I probably have just by saying this much) but as soon as I can announce something, I will. In VERY LARGE TYPE. Promise.

A Confession

Every once in a while I meet someone who only knows me from this blog and if I'm wearing a skirt, they seem disappointed that it's not a dress.

Me, I consider dresses and skirts more or less equivalent, sartorially; they both belong to the 'not-pants' group, which, nutritionally-speaking, I need at least one serving of a day. I named this blog "A Dress A Day" because "A Dress (or Skirt) A Day" was a bit unwieldy.

That said, I'm headed to the UK for a week and I'm only packing skirts! The trauma! But ... I'm doing some work that involves visiting primary schools, so I don't want to wear super-high heels, which are the only ones I have that work with the Duros, and I'm in the middle of switching from summer to winter sewing, so the new version of this dress that I wanted to bring/wear isn't ready and and and ...

But I have to admit, I really, really love this particular skirt for traveling. (For those of you who have been playing along at home, this is the same pattern as this tutorial.

The pockets here are perfect for holding my boarding pass, ID, and phone, and it's easy to dress the skirt up (okay, maybe not the blue-and-orange camo version) by adding very nice flats, tights (or even knee socks!) and a nice sweater. Here's a closeup of the pocket, trimmed in orange twill tape:



The next best thing about this skirt is playing with the facings and the pocket linings. Here's the waistband facing of this one:



Of course, I've also been driving myself nuts trying to figure out what my Next Big Dress is going to be, after my obsession with the Duro. I might post on that later this week.

And, furthermore, while my self-induced pie coma is wearing off, I just wanted to say that one of the things I have been thankful for these past few years is the generous and openhearted community of folks who read this blog. You know who you are. I think you all deserve another piece of pie, wherever you are.

Book Review: Sew What! Skirts

I'm being asked a lot now about how to learn to sew, and since my method, although ideal (get my mom to teach you) is somewhat impractical to recreate, I've been looking at gateway-drug, I mean introductory, sewing books.

Sew What! Skirts looked good from the get-go, and I wasn't disappointed.

It's not just that several of the skirts offer pockets (albeit simple patch ones), or that the idea is to learn fitting techniques that you can apply across multiple (patternless) skirts, or that rickrack features prominently. It's that I think that the authors (Francesca Denhartog & Carole Ann Camp) have figured out what motivates beginning sewists: it's the fabric, stupid.

Fabric is what draws folks in. It's the promise of taking that gorgeous yardage and draping it around oneself (or one's home) that leads people down the path towards the $7000 Bernina. And in every home-ec horror story I've ever heard, the indignity of having to make something useless has been compounded by the useless thing having to be done in boring, hideous, cheap fabric.

The fabrics shown in this book are, frankly, awesome. Beautiful patterns, lovely weaves; not a scratchy double-knit in the lot. The skirts are wearable, the instructions clear.

This is a very good book for beginners, in that it explains *everything*. The instructions stop just short of including "Inhale. Exhale." They also, bless them, allow for the possibility that you might screw up, and screw up badly. They advise you to leave extra seam allowances so that you can fix your mistakes, for example, and tell you to start with cotton, as it's easier.

Lately I've been feeling a bit guilty about some of my sewing cheerleading -- I'm worried that I'm making it sound too easy, and that I've forgotten how hard it was for me to learn some techniques -- things I could do backwards in a hailstorm now, but which occasioned many lonely hours with a seam ripper before. Part of that frustration was me being an impatient teenager, sure, but part also is just doing and doing and doing until you can feel when you have something right. This book has a little of the same cheerleading problem, but since it's at such a basic level, and advocating a do-your-own-thing, "it's not a flaw, it's an interesting design decision" attitude, I feel as if it's warranted. The only change I would have made would be to emphasize more the need for practice.

Sewing, I've come to realize, is a lot more like athletics than I'd like to admit. Despite having been, at one time or another, a cross-country runner (slowly), a college soccer player (ineptly, and inept in Div III at that), and a discus and shotput thrower (not very far, and not for very long), and despite my obsession with roller-skating, I think of myself as profoundly unathletic. So the realization that sewing, like other muscle-memory activities, is something that you just can't read a book on and be note-perfect at, was one that was slow to come to me. But, just as you don't have to train for a marathon to enjoy running for exercise (shudder), you don't have to practice couture techniques to make a perfectly lovely skirt. All you have to do is practice, period. Those practice runs are still exercise, even if they aren't marathons, and those practice garments are still wearable -- and if you are patient and follow the instructions in this book, they'll be better than wearable.

So: this is a good book, especially for beginning sewers. Fabric is good. Experimentation is good. You (too) can be good. Take it to heart, and take your heart to the sewing machine.

Does This Make Me Look Crazy?

I was recently packing for yet another trip, this one complicated by trying to decide what, from my limited collection of camera-ready clothes ("camera-ready," in this case, meaning 'having a pattern that doesn't induce seizures in any eventual watchers and is not white or black') would be suitable for both a taped interviewy thing and a taped rock concert, and as I was trying stuff on, I found myself asking the eternal question:

"Does this make me look fat?"

Luckily, I was only asking myself, not pestering my long-suffering husband. (He likes to make himself scarce while I'm packing; he doesn't need to increase his store of profanity.) We have a deal: I don't ask him if I'm fat, and he doesn't ask me where his wallet and keys are. (We break this deal, like glass, in cases of emergency.)

At the moment of asking, though, I stopped for a minute. Why is "fat" automatically the one thing that must be avoided? I'm not talking "need to be airlifted from house for medical attention," fat, I'm talking "fifteen extra pounds from a crappy winter" fat. (Not that the degree really matters.) Why, of all the aesthetic choices that can be made, is "slim" the one that has to be prioritized? Why am I not asking myself, first and foremost, "Does this make me look unhappy?" or "Does this make me look boring?" or "Does this make me look fashion-victimy?" or "Does this make me look like a visiting space alien, and not in the sexy lamé-bikini-and-boots way?"

So I stopped asking the "fat" question, and started asking the "unhappy" one, and this is one of the things where the answer was "No, it doesn't make you look unhappy. Quite the reverse!" But: does it make me look TOO HAPPY, aka crazy? (I already know that it doesn't make me look slimmer, and that's okay.)

Here's a close-up:


It's a skirt that used to be a plain circle, without a waistband, and recently I got tired of skirts without waistbands, so I took it apart and added one. (With quite a bit of cursing and muttering, I might add.) The fabric is from Ikea; someday I'm going to walk into someone's house wearing this and match all their couch cushions. Then it WILL make me look crazy, but I'll be happy, so I don't care.

I'm NOT quite sure this is actually camera-ready (stripes might be bad, right?) but if it does end up airing (and yes yes I will give you all details when I know them) I'm sure they'll post some kind of warning.