Boxer Shorts and Baggy Blouse

 

Over the winter, I bought a lot of 5 pairs of shorts for $10.53 on eBay...not because I really needed any more shorts, but because I was suckered in by the one colorful pair in the bunch—a red satin one with the tags still on! Sadly, when the lot arrived, I found all 5 pairs too big, even the ones that were nominally my size. I sold the one that I thought was beyond hope (not only too big, but too short), and kept the others for re-fitting. 

Resizing pants is no fun, but shorts are fairly forgiving in fit, and fortunately these ones were all a fairly thin material for sewing (no heavy denim, thank goodness!), so I found it easy enough to modify them with a couple of darts at the waistband.

I simply measured how much I wanted to take off at the top, pinched, pinned, and sewed, trying to end my dart at the bottom of the waistband. The red satin shorts were now wearable!

I call them boxer shorts because they remind me of the red satin shorts that boxers wear in movies.

But in my case, I didn't wear them for an athletic event, I paired them with even more satin for a glam Sunday dinner!

It was another appearance of my yellow floral one-shoulder top! Featuring huge splashes of red, it was a natural companion to the red shorts...but I found that the red was all getting hidden within the folds of the shoulder. Fortunately there was a simple fix that required only a little bit of outside-the-box thinking—I turned the shirt backward! With a big baggy sack of a top like this, there's no real difference between front and back (other than where the tag happens to be), so it's an easy trick to pull off. The print on the backside was slightly different, featuring a big red flower front and off-center!

Astonishingly, as I was departing my dinner and tugging the hem into place for the 50th time of the day, I realized I'm getting bored with this shirt. Although last year, I sang its praises with my whole heart, after 4 years of ownership, I've now worn it in every possible combination—with black pants, with jeans, with shorts, with yellow heels, with blue heels, with pink wedges, with flat black sandals. It no longer holds the strange allure that it did when it was new. It might be finally time to retire it, so consider this blog post a fond farewell!