Military Fashion Show

Winter is a terrible time for looking cute. If you want to stay warm, you're obliged to bundle up in so many layers, you don't really resemble a fashionista so much as a basket of laundry. This is made worse when your friend, a self-proclaimed lover of "ugly sweaters," decides you simply must own one of his old green military surplus sweaters.

Standing at attention

Despite its shapelessness, you are convinced you can and must find a way to make a passable outfit out of it. So what do you do? Start with khaki. Military greens and khaki go together like pretzels and salt. Like babies and rattles. Like black and pink! Just slightly less fun to look at.

You choose a twirly khaki skirt that you got (on sale, of course) at Rainbow and pull the sweater down over it so the skirt looks extra short and the sweater isn't all bunched up like a fuzzy fat suit. You'd like to wear knee socks with this getup, but unfortunately, the ladylike shoes that make up your entire footwear collection are not going to cut it, so you'll have to go with the chunkiest shoes you have--calf-length brown boots. A dubious color match, but the best you could come up with.

You realize, of course, that you are going to freeze to death. With 2/3 of your legs exposed, any thermal benefit you might gain from the bulky sweater is completely undermined. You have just made a tactical error that could result in hypothermia, but at least you'll go down looking spiffy!

Excuses, Excuses

Sometimes, people use depression as an excuse not to write in their blogs.
Other times, people use lack of supplies as an excuse not to have cool adventures in clothing.

I would never – never! – do either one of those. Especially now, now that I have this awesome new sewing box. You see, for years, I've been storing my sewing supplies in whatever I could find that would hold them—what started as a travel sewing kit expanded to fill the accessories box on my sewing machine, then continued to grow until I needed to find a sewing box. Being a cheapskate, I chose a dinky, flimsy cardboard box that served me for over a year.

All that changed when my mom came to visit this past Thanksgiving and brought a huge collection of fabric and an entire sewing table. That's right—table! My sewing box is now so big, it has legs! And as a bonus, it came filled with sewing supplies! Now that I have the materials, and the space to store them, I have fewer reasons not to embark on ambitious crafty projects.

I hope that this will also inspire me to not get all sad and mopey and let my blog languish unwritten in for months at a time. No more excuses.

The old sewing box.

Here's the new one!