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.