Week from home

Today marks the culmination of my first full week of teleworking. I know I'm not unique in this experience, and while I'm sure all of the recently homebound have different challenges, my personal favorite one has been deciding what to wear.

Should I go purely for comfort in my coziest of house clothes? Should I dress to impress just in case of an unexpected video chat with the dean? Should I explore the possibilities of mullet-outfits (business on top, party on the bottom)? How professional is too professional? Should I bother changing out of my pajamas at all? There were so many questions, and I had fun trying to answer them over the course of the week.

Adapting to my new fashion reality is still a work in progress, but I decided early on that I was going to have to put in at least some effort. After all, getting to wear something snazzy is often the main reason I get out of bed in the morning! Besides, I have all weekend every weekend to dress like a slob, and all these clothes in my closet aren't gonna wear themselves! By the time we're cleared to enter the real world again, spring will be over, and some of my still-new clothes will have to wait another 6 months before the weather is cool enough to put them on.

So I'm dressing up for my future! For my sanity! For the sake of keeping a somewhat familiar routine! And for you! Because I know you were absolutely dying to see what I wore "to work" this week!

Monday

Over the past few months, I'd invested heavily in fun leggings (The collapse of LuLaRoe no doubt had a large part in the abundance of wild prints at bargain prices). I'm glad I did, because they are one thing that I just couldn't see myself wearing to the office. But I wasn't shy about wearing them from home. I paired my first pair, festooned with orange birds, with a long black top, arm warmers because teleworking is no excuse for a sky-high heating bill, and my newly minted house shoes. They didn't match and that bothered me, but I was experimenting with my limits!

Tuesday

My roommate's reaction: "Those are some loud pants, girl!" Yeah, this is one pair of trousers I'm never attempting in the office.

It didn't take long for me to realize that wearing the same pair of shoes every day was going to wear on my patience, so on Tuesday, I decided to try ballet flats. This pair actually has an ankle strap, which I had to sort of twist and tuck into the shoe, because I didn't want to be buckling and unbuckling my shoes all day, and I did plan to take them off while doing things like sitting cross-legged in my office chair and doing my hourly exercises.

In retrospect, I think just leaving them on buckled would have been better, because my toes got cramps from trying to hold the too-big shoes on all day.

Wednesday

A friend stopped by my house in the morning and commented on how businessy I was dressed. But this was the day of my first video meeting with my boss, and I wanted to show that I'm serious about work even when I'm not actually there. I figured my boss wasn't going to see the not-so-businessy leggings, which I would definitely not try at the office with such a short top. Fortunately, even with the short top, I had everything under cover.

A long scarf can help keep your crotch from accidental exposure when you're wearing tighter pants.

I just learned that tip today, and I'm definitely keeping it up my sleeve for future fun with leggings!

Thursday

Generally, my work week wouldn't be complete without at least one dress, so I wore a new mauve one with a crisscross neckline. At first, I tried on some grey thigh-high socks, but decided against them. They wouldn't really keep me warm enough, they'd probably be falling down all day, and who was I really trying to impress? My dog? Maybe I should have tried harder, because my roommate's friends showed up. One of them complimented the dress, so I'm glad that my efforts were not all in vain.

Friday

It was the last day of the week, and I realized to my chagrin that I'd worn leggings every single day. Not very diverse, and an Unfashionista is all about variety. I decided to branch out into pants, but found that there were very few options that actually worked.

Full leg mobility is paramount (for some reason, I can wear jeans all day at work no problem, but can't stand having them on when I'm at home), which left most options off the table. My looser pants tend to be on the long side, and I wasn't about to bust out high heels just to hang out in my bedroom (plus the constant clacking would probably drive my downstairs roommate crazy!). Eventually I found a pair of cropped black pants that fit the bill. I worried I'd be too cold in them, but I survived, with the help of some arm warmers again.

With a full week behind me, I can say I've learned a lot about dressing for work-from-home.

1. My sense of comfort still trumps my sense of style. While I'll make small concessions, like showing more skin than is totally temperature-appropriate, I will not concede to wearing anything binding or restrictive.
2. I really have a wealth of clothing for wearing at home, beyond the limited collection of "house clothes" I'd designated previously.
3. Leggings every day may work for some girls, but not for me!
4. I am pleased to have found a matching pair of soft ballet flats for nearly every outfit I've tried. If I succumb to the urge to shop for more indoor clothes, house shoes are probably gonna be at the top of my list.
5. Dressing up for work, while it seems somewhat pointless if I'm only doing it for a blog, actually does have a purpose in that it keeps me on task. At least, I can't embark on really dirty housecleaning projects (which I've been tempted to do almost every day) while I'm wearing my "good" clothes!

With one week down, I hardly feel I'm an expert on teleworking fashion, so I'll probably continue the experimentation next week. I probably won't continue to blog every outfit, but if I have any epiphanies, I'll probably share them. After all, I don't have anything else to fashion blog about for the foreseeable future!

House Shoes: A DIY

OK, beloved readers, you can stop holding your breath. The moment you've all been waiting for has arrived—the moment when I reveal the end result of my House Shoes project! In case you missed it, my previous post explains (in agonizing detail) just how I came to need a pair of house shoes; today's post will tell you how I made them better!

As you've already ascertained, I started with a pair of pistachio green Keds. No amount of washing was going to remove the greyish hue from the cotton fabric, and no amount of solvent was going to lift the rust-red paint spot from the one shoe's toe. Trust me; I tried. The only solution was to cover the ugly up!

While my favorite shoe-renovation strategy lately has been to cover the old material with a new layer of fabric, that wasn't going to work for these unstructured but highly textured tennis shoes. I decided I would paint the shoes in a two-tone gradient.

My watercolor wash technique seemed to work pretty well when I did it on the pink ballet flats (they are one of my few refashions that have remained in active usage beyond a year!), so I decided to try it again with these shoes.

I started by soaking the shoes in water to facilitate paint spread.

I stuffed the toes with plastic bags (which wouldn't absorb any of the water) to help them hold their shape while I worked.

Then I mixed some cheap sky blue craft paint with water in about a 1:4 ratio. The paint was already pretty thin, but I wanted it downright liquid!

I brushed the paint onto the shoes in a crescent shape across the toes.

To blend it better with the unpainted fabric, I painted plain water in a circular motion over the parts where the blue was still too intense.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to decorate anything other than the toes, but I accidentally swiped some paint onto the back of one shoe, so the decision was made for me!

To cover up my mistake, I used the same technique on the back of the shoe, starting with a narrow strip of blue at the top of the heel, and widening out towards the bottom. (Photo shows heels after they had dried!)

All that was left was to wait. To speed up the drying process, I set the shoes in front of the heat vent in my wall.

I left the shoes to dry overnight, and when I came for them in the morning, they were completely dry. Unfortunately, some of the color had bled in an unwanted direction, so I didn't have quite the neat ombré crescent I'd been hoping for, but house shoes are house shoes! They don't have to be perfect.

I was itching for a little somethin' extra, so I decided to dye the laces blue as well. I mixed up a little bit more paint into my water mixture, then soaked the laces in it for a few minutes.

I laid the laces out to dry on a plastic bag. When they were fully dry, I soaked them in the paint one more time.

After a second drying session, I used a pipette to touch up the parts that hadn't absorbed as much paint, to create a more even coloration.

The finished product! 

While this simple little dye job didn't cover up all the flaws in the shoes, it certainly distracts from them. I'm a lot happier to wear them now than I was when they were dingy and dirt-stained.

They even (kind of!) matched my work-from home outfit on Friday. Teleworking fashion is a whole category of outfits that I'm interested to explore, but that's another post for another time. At least I now have a decent pair of work-from-house shoes to get me started!

House Shoes: A Story

You might not remember these pastel green sneakers, because I never wore them for an OOTD, but they were one of the shoes purchased in my broken-toe shoe-shopping spree of 2015. In the years since then, despite never finding them blog-worthy, I wore them often enough that they eventually started looking dingy and unfit to be seen in public. They still had plenty of life left in them, though, so I kept them around to see if they might be candidates for a resuscitation of some sort.

It was earlier this year when I realized they could serve a different purpose as house shoes—sort of like slippers, but...shoes!

From October to May every year, I have an almost constant need for foot-warming technology when I'm at home. My hardwood floors are great when it comes to cleaning and maintenance, but one of their downsides is they're not exactly warm. Sometimes socks are sufficient, but when you live in a house with a very sloppy drinker (a.k.a a dog), you will be constantly stepping in tiny puddles, and I don't recommend doing that with socks on unless you want to be cold and wet for the next hour. Plus, when it's cold enough inside, even socks don't provide enough insulation.

I've tried various garments for this purpose, but (with the exception of some felted wool slippers with a leather sole that I bought at a market in Australia and therefore could not replace when they wore out), all of them have eventually failed the test of daily wear.

The bunny slippers were too small (of course! I ordered them from China!) and hot, the knit booties with the fur lining flopped around too much when I walked, the unicorn slippers had permeable soles, the cozy sheep socks were always dangling too far off the ends of my toes.

The idea to use my old green Keds in lieu of slippers came only after staring at them countless times over the winter, wondering when I was going to figure out what to do with them. But when it came, it turned out to be a good idea. These shoes slide on, so I don't have to fiddle with laces; they have a thin flexible sole, so they're comfortable in a wide range of positions; and the sole is rubber, meaning dog droplets are no object!

I planned to give them a brief trial run and then get on with the aforementioned resuscitation, but somehow laziness won out, and I wore them as house shoes for about a month without ever making them look presentable (my standards of dress when no one can see me are shockingly low!).

Then the coronavirus arrived on our shores (I feel like I'm going to be saying that in every blog post for a while). The entire world population has been advised to stay home as much as possible. My employer has instituted work-from-home for everyone whose job permits, so I'm teleworking every day now. At least until April 10, but who knows what will happen after that? If I'm going to be home almost 24/7 for the foreseeable future, I really have to step up my house clothes game. And that includes my house shoes.

So on the fifth day of my self-semi-quarantine, I decided to give them a dye job. I would tell you about it, but somehow this story has run away with me, and it has gotten far too long to tack a DIY onto the end. So you'll have to wait, and bate your breath, for the thrilling conclusion. Will my house shoes go from drab to fab? Or will their transformation be just plain bad? Find out in the next installment of The Unfashionista blog!

It's still St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day this year happened to coincide with Spring Break at the university where I work, so I was looking forward to having the whole day off and celebrating in American-Irish style—wearing lots of green, getting a group together, and visiting every pub in town.

Then the coronavirus arrived on our shores. Before long, every pub in town was closed, and getting a group together sounded like a very unwise idea. I could still wear lots of green, but what would be the point if no one would see me but my dog? He's color-blind!

I was all set to garb myself in my typical "house clothes," which are just a collection of miscellaneous loungewear that's a smidge less shabby than my pajamas, but I was feeling sad about it. For the second year in a row, I wasn't going to be able to get decked out and celebrate St. Paddy's (last year, I think I was driving all day).

Then it occurred to me: what is a fashion blog good for, if not sharing your style with the people who can't see it in person? Even if I couldn't wear my holiday outfit in public, I could at least show some holiday spirit online! It's still St. Patrick's Day, even if I'm a party of one!

 

So I gathered up my new (thrifted) shamrock shirt, topped it with a green cardigan (If you look closely, you can see that the sweater and the tee both feature a little subtle heart motif as well!), and finished off the look with some stylin' yoga pants! 

 

 

I just happen to have a Lucky Irish bed frame in my possession right now (um, if you want to buy it, it's currently on Craigslist!), so naturally I used it as the backdrop for my pictures, and added a leprechaun-scale mug of green faux beer (water and soap bubbles, guys; it takes more than 6 days of social distancing to get me desperate enough to actually drink beer!). Nothing like being confined at home to inspire an elaborate photoshoot!

If I'd been going out, I'd have probably worn jeans and added earrings, but if you're gonna stay home all day, you might as well be comfy! No shoes required in Valerie's Pretend Pub!

Sláinte!

Peony pants

 

What manner of flowers are these? That's what I wondered to myself over and over again as I marveled over the print on my pants and mused about what to title their debut blog post. As you can see, I settled on peonies because of the alliteration (but I'm open to the corrective influence of my more horticulturally minded readers!).

What's more important is how fabulous they and their respective trousers are. The print looks like a painting, and with its strategic placement of light and dark colors, the flowers seem to glow from within. The photo really doesn't do them justice. The pants are well made, a perfect fit for me (not a stitch of alteration needed!), and in pristine condition despite being a pre-owned find.

When I discovered them at the thrift store, the price tag read $11.99. Even half off, they were pretty pricey for this cheapskate, but I could not resist the allure of a practically-made-for-me pair of statement slacks!

The only question (other than what type of flowers they really depict) was how to wear them to make their first outfit a stunning success. As per usual when I have a new item of clothing, I took pictures of the pants with several shirt options, ranging from plain black (the better to put all eyes on the wondrous pants), to various pinks, to what you see here: a golden yellow top.

I was planning for one of the more subtle options that involved short sleeves, but the weather forecast went down from 66 to just 60 overnight, so in the morning, I called an audible and went with the long-sleeved tee. It makes for quite the daring explosion of color when combined with the pinks in the pants, but somehow (rather against my expectations), I think the combo works—tied together by the swipes of yellow that suffuse both the pink flowers and the brownish-green leaves. 

 

Yet all that yellow is still kind of much, so I sought to tone it down by covering some of it up—thank you, black scarf—and tucking the rest of it in. I'm not a frequent shirt-tucker, but somehow, this particular yellow tee disproportionately gets the tucking treatment when I wear it!

I'm happy with the way these pants' first outfit turned out, and I'm looking forward to my next opportunity to wear them in a new way. The only third question is, will this maximalist combo of crazy colors be the best way to wear 'em, or will less prove to be more and a subtler pairing win out?

National Dress (in Blue) Day

Not too long ago, I subscribed to the National Day Calendar. My motivation? It's just plain fun to have something random to celebrate at any given time...but I also figured it would help give me occasional inspiration on what to wear. Boy, did it not disappoint on March 6, when it informed me that it was not only National Dress Day (every March 6), but also National Dress in Blue Day (first Friday of March). Two clothing-related observances for the price of one! Naturally, my outfit for this Friday, March 6, simply had to involve a blue dress!

The pickings were slim. I had only two blue dresses to choose from: this one and the one with the fox and moon. The cutesy imagery on the latter, I was sure, would detract from the overall concept of "blue dress," so I went with the former.

The dress alone didn't give me much to blog about, with its simple structure and striped design, so I turned to layering for some added interest. This black tuxedo vest was the missing piece. Long a staple in my collection, it rarely makes an appearance in my outfit, but when it does, it always looks snazzy. I loved what it did for this look, somehow giving a plain T-shirt-dress a touch of style.

National Dress Day exists purely for the fun of fashion (it was invented by a fashion designer), but National Dress in Blue Day is supposed to raise awareness for colon cancer, so I would be remiss if I didn't remind you to eat your fiber, and get your screenings if you're over 50!

Peacocking

There comes a time in every Unfashionista's life, when she must ask herself the age-old question: How much sequins is too much sequins for the office? For this Unfashionista, that time is just about every Friday Funday, which she saves for the second-most exciting clothes in her wardrobe (the most exciting clothes get reserved for Saturdays!).

This Friday, the questionable garment on consideration was this sparkly peacock-bedecked dress, which you might recognize from its previous life as an oft-photographed regular-old dress (it's the dress that keeps on giving!).

I'm in an ongoing frenzy of appliquéing (see my llama shirt and velvet slip dress for recent examples), and one appliqué that I've been waiting to use for entirely too long is the peacock you now see on the dress. I was hoping to get a new, plain black dress for this purpose, but isn't it better to use what you have? So that's what I did.

Hopefully I won't need a plain long-sleeved black dress until after I get bored of literally peacocking around...but if I do, it'll be easy enough to remove the appliqué just by washing the dress a few times (I used water-soluble fabric glue). Honestly, this is probably the first and last time I'll ever wear this dress this way, because the weight of the peacock pulls the neckline out of shape...and plus, I think this much sequins might just be too much sequins for the office.