Friday Funday

 

 Many times, I have been tempted to wear my most business-like clothes on a Friday, but I usually hold myself back and wear something a little more casual instead. Friday is supposed to be when you dress down, not up!

However, this Friday, I put on my nicest wool pants and blazer, and decked myself out in a suit that wouldn't look out of place in even the stuffiest of offices. OK, I kid myself—in my lavender camisole, purple shoes, and tacky grape-themed jewelry, I am surely pushing the boundaries of business attire, but hey, it's Friday!

There are many reasons I chose to wear a suit on a Friday, among them being: the weather has been atrociously cold and wet for what seems like ever (a day or two ago, I heard on the radio that we were entering our tenth straight day of rain), and I felt like wearing something covered-up and warm. Also, I switched to my summer wardrobe yesterday (for reasons I'll explain in a future post), meaning my selection of warm and covered-up clothing just dwindled to almost nothing. But probably most importantly, I desired an unobtrusive backdrop for the aforementioned grape jewelry I recently acquired.

Let's have a closer look at it, shall we?

 

 

I got it on eBay for just 2.25$ for the set. There are many things I've learned not buy direct from China (dresses, dresses, and more dresses!), but jewelry is usually a safe bet. It is the same stuff you can buy at a chain store (much of the jewelry I've purchased from China has arrived with labels such as Forever 21 and Cato), but it comes at a fraction of the cost. If you're ever looking to expand your collection of costume jewelry without breaking the bank, eBay (with a free shipping filter) is your answer!

Unfashionista by the numbers

I am on my last 3-day stretch of compression stockings. What I thought was going to be a week-long minor nuisance ended up being over a month of seriously cramped style (punctuated by periods of freedom that sometimes lasted days). Among the many things I learned about thigh-high compression socks during this time, was that you can really only wear them with loose pants and knee-length or longer skirts. That's a hard pill to swallow when the weather's warming up and all you want to do is parade around in your short dresses!

Since I haven't been able to make full use of my clothing collection for over a month, I consoled myself by taking inventory of my clothing collection, and while I was in counting mode, I decided to take inventory of some other things as well. Read on to find out the vital statistics of my closet and blog!

I have 179 articles of clothing within easy access in my closet. Consider this a very low estimate of my current collection, as this does not include athletic clothing, pajamas, socks, undergarments, and layering pieces such as tanks and leggings, nor does it include seasonal clothing that is currently in storage or clothing in the laundry. The breakdown of this collection is as follows: 45 dresses, 38 tops (sweaters and blouses), 36 T-shirts, 27 skirts, 22 casual pants, and 11 dress pants.

Since I value recycling, my next step was to calculate how many of these 179 pieces were new and how many secondhand. As it turns out, I purchased 21% of my clothing new, received 9% of it new as gifts, and purchased or received the remaining 70% used (some of these still had never been worn when I received them, but I consider them secondhand). Casual pants really skewed the "new" percentages upward, as 11 out of 21 pairs of them were purchased new.

Along a similar vein, since I "recycle" my own clothing a lot, I also set out to determine how much of my clothing I have personally given a second life—that is, altered, repaired, or outright refashioned. In nearly all categories, 26-29% of my collection was modified in one of these ways. Once again, jeans and casual pants were the outliers, with only 23 percent of them being altered. In the end, I calculated that 27.8 percent of my clothing is reworked. 

Now if you've looked at pictures of my closet recently, you'll know that I organize my shoes by color. But which color wins the day? Let's find out. For this count, I included all the shoes out in plain sight as well as all the shoes in boxes within easy reach. I did not include the summer shoes that are stowed away in the back of my closet, nor the snow boots that I've already packed away. Unsurprisingly, black shoes strongly outnumbered those of any other hue, but among the more colorful varieties, aqua had a pretty clear majority. Note to self: stop buying aqua shoes!

• Black - 16
• Brown - 7
• Tan - 4
• Cream - 4
• White - 2
• Black & white - 1 
• Grey - 1
• Silver - 2
• Gold - 2
• Red - 4
• Yellow - 1
• Green - 3
• Aqua - 5
• Blue - 4
• Purple - 4
• Pink - 3
• Multicolor - 3

Growing bored of counting my clothes, I decided to start counting blog posts about my clothes. If there's one thing I love as much as fashion, it's words. I know I enjoy a good pun as much as more than the next writer, so I was curious how many times I let my penchant for wordplay play out in my posts.

As it turns out, prior to today, I have written 404 posts. Of these, 23 have a new portmanteau or play on words as the title. That's only 6%, but as dads everywhere know, too many cheesy jokes are just that: too many. However, if you are ready for cheesy pun overload, here's a list of all the posts I found that play with words a little too rough...along with explanations, because it's not a good joke unless you have to explain it!

1. Poppycock (Interjection containing the sound "peacock" to match the clothing's motif)
2. Bad Jeans (Bad genes)
3. Grape Fine (Grape vine)
4. Cutup Girl (Pinup girl)
5. Looking Sharp (Pointy shoes = Common phrase)
6. Bug Spree (Bug spray)
7. Spring / Roll (Spring season + rolled hems = Common food)
8. Look o' the Irish (Luck o' the Irish)
9. Pinka Dots (Pink + Polka dots)
10. Frog Legs (A food, refers to the frogs on my legs)
11. Peptomint (Pepto pink + Peppermint)
12. Pin(k)stripes (Pink + Pinstripes)
13. CaturDIY (Cat + Saturday + DIY)
14. All White Already (All right already—common phrase in my youth that seems to have gone out of vogue)
15. Curls' Night Out (Girls' night out)
16. Cowboys and Indonesians (Cowboys and Indians)
17. Knee Length to a grasshopper (Knee-high to a grasshopper—you've heard this one, right?)
18. Modochrome (Monochrome + mod)
19. Vest Western (Best Western)
20. Vestoration (Vest + Restoration)
21. Curl Talk (Girl talk)
22. Cat / Suit (Suit + cat shoes = catsuit)
23. Surf's Pup! (Surf's Up + a dog)

And finally, because one of the easiest ways to play with words is to co-opt an already popular combination of them, I had to include a tally of how many of my posts have a reference to a work of film, literature, and music as the title. The total is 26, which is, again, fewer than I thought, but copyright litigation isn't fun, so again it's probably better that most of my titles are original works. Still, in case you're interested, here are the ones that aren't!

1. Are you Ready, Boots?  (Song lyric)
2. Blue Moon (Song title)
3. Greensleeveless (Modified Song title)
4. My Future Valentine (Modified Song title)
5. The First of Autumn (Song title)
6. He liked it so he put a ring on it! (Modified Song lyric)
7. The tree was in the wood (Song lyric)
8. She's a pirate (Modified Song title)
9. How does your garden grow? (Nursery rhyme verse)
10. The Hunt for Red (Shortened Book title)
11. Scarf Face (Modified Movie title)
12. This is crazy (Song lyric)
13. HVAC is the cruelest this month (Modified Poem verse) 
14. OpUnfashionista Style! (Modified Song lyric)
15. Blue Velvet (Song title)
16. Shopping Hood: Woman in Tights (Modified Movie title)
17. Yippee Ki-Yo-Ki-Yay (Song lyric)
18. Valerie, you're a star (Modified Song title)
19. Doctor Shoe (Modified TV show title)
20. Strawberry Fields (Song title)
21. I just wanna be a sheep (Song title)
22. Don we now our gay apparel (Song lyric)
23. They say I'm shoe-nuts (Misremembered song lyric)
24. No country for old scrunchies (Movie title)
25. Paint it pink (Modified Song title)
26. Gold & Curls (Modified TV show title)

And now, I'm finally done—with this post, if not with compression stockings! But in two days, I hope to have full use of my legs and wardrobe again...so if statistics are not your thing, stand by for your familiar flamboyant fashion, coming soon!

Oversized Patchwork Jacket

A few months ago, I resized this extra-large hoodie to make it into a slimmer fitting, but still long, jacket for biking in. I left you with a complaint about the kerning that I simply had to rectify. It took me several months, but eventually I got around to covering up the offendingly spaced letters.

At first, I attempted to just scrape off the screen print. After ours of relentlessly picking at it (I stretched the fabric over my knee and then scratched with my fingernail, until both my fingers and my legs were sore), I finally had removed all of the lettering. But even after a nice hot bath in the washing machine, you could still see the ghost of Virginia Beach, so I had to think of a way to cover the words up.

I wanted to do a fun graphic, but couldn't think of a representational shape that would look good extended over the two halves of the front, so I decided to go abstract with patchwork instead. Here's how I originally sketched it, with a graduated design that would be fully covered and busy at the top, with fewer and fewer patches as you went down the front.

Then I got to work with actual fabric! I used scraps from previous projects: sleeves from the pink and green plaid shirt, an old off-white T-shirt that I've been cutting apart just for its fabric for years, the pink lining that I used briefly inside my Indonesian Princess dress (after turning it into a skirt, I am refashioning it again, and I hope you'll see the result soon!), bits of another Indonesian dress that I am still struggling with, and a couple of green scraps whose origin I no longer recall. I cut them into variously sized rectangles and then started dropping them onto the hoodie until they were arranged to my liking.

I would eventually sew them all down, but first I had to keep them in place, which I accomplished with a bit of temporary fabric glue.

Once they were all somewhat fixed in position, my next step was to remove the excess that dangled over the edges of the sweatshirt.

Then I had to sew them down permanently. This was a more challenging endeavor than I ever imagined.

I chose a contrasting white thread with brown bobbin thread to match the interior of the jacket. I started at one edge of the design, and began zigzag stitching over the edges of the patches, following a winding path and trying to sew as many edges as I could without overlapping a seam. Pretty soon, however, I was only able to sew an inch in in any given direction before I ran into an already stitched seam. So then I had to pick up my needle, reposition the fabric, and start over again in a new spot. This took forever! 

Of course it got messy. There were plenty of spots where I somehow failed to overlock the seam entirely, and other spots where the fabric frayed out from under my stitches. But lots and lots of repairs later, I was finally finished!

I wanted to follow my original design of placing a few lone patches over the bottom portion of the hoodie, but my original design had neglected to take the pockets into account. There was no way I could machine-stitch over those pockets without stitching them closed, and no way I was going to continue this labor by hand, so the finished product is a little more top-heavy than I intended, but it is nonetheless a finished product, and I consider that a victory!

 

 

Gonna be a hoedown

I found this skirt at the thrift store for half off of 4 dollars. The design is a little over-the-top, but over-the-top is what I do best! The construction is a little iffy; it looks homemade and some of the seams are crazily uneven, but I have a special affinity for the other clumsy tailors of the world! And the size is quite a bit too big; I had to reattach most of the waist fastenings at a more optimal spot for my waist, but more fabric means more swish in the skirt! I realized after I took the pictures that I still left too much room in the waist, which makes it look a little dumpy with a tucked-in shirt, so I'll probably alter it again later. But overall, I am pretty pleased with my 2-dollar find. I thought it was a great, somewhat irreverent, thing to wear for fun on a Friday!

One of the things that other fashionistas do, which I'm not good at, is wearing clothes in unexpected combinations—say, sneakers or a T-shirt with a ballgown. Sure, I wear unexpected clothes (wearing a flouncy skirt in a crimson bandanna print to anything other than a square dance is a good example), but I tend to wear them with other clothes that fit a common theme—for example, grandma skirt goes with grandma boots, 90's dress with combat boots, yellow and green pants with yellow and green necklace, and I think you're getting the picture. I don't take many risks with mixing prints or mixing high and low or mixing modern with old. If I were to have a fashion New Year's resolution, it would probably be along the lines of trying to leave my ever-coordinated comfort zone...though it's not like I haven't tried before!

Anyway, this long UnPhilosophical interlude is just something that came to my mind as I realized that the shoes I wore were right along the lines of what you'd expect to see paired with a midi-length circle skirt: white oxfords with a low demure heel. When I think of these shoes, I picture a girl from the 50's, carrying her schoolbooks and about to go to a sock hop! If I hadn't been wearing compression stockings, I would have surely worn bobby socks under these shoes.

And on top, the bow-neck white T-shirt calls to mind a Western aesthetic (string ties, anyone?) which goes along perfectly with my square-dance skirt.

From there on, the little details are all chosen for color coordination—a red necklace and red earrings.

So while this outfit doesn't earn many points for creativity, I still stand by its power to provide fun on a Friday!

Socks, sandals, and celebration!

Last week, I spent Tuesday through Thursday in a compression stocking, which, as you probably know by now, means I was forced to wear long pants to hide my socks for the entirety of the week.

And then Friday, my boyfriend and I traveled to Boston for a wedding reception. A vacation can be a trying time for an Unfashionista—a time when one is forced to live out of a suitcase, without one's massive collection of clothing, and is usually obliged to dress for comfort and versatility (blugh!) rather than aesthetics.

My boyfriend hinted that we might go clubbing during our trip, so I got excited and filled half my suitcase with various clothes and shoes that I could wear to different types of establishments. I got so excited, in fact, that I forgot to pack pajamas and workout clothing. And after all that, we did not even set foot near a nightclub! So you can imagine how frustrated I have felt, having spent the last 4 days wearing nothing but old jeans, the same pair of sneakers, and a bunch of mismatched layers of shirts and jackets for warmth (Boy, was Boston cold! Even when the sunny areas were warm, the shady ones were icy, and the wind was positively biting!).

This should give you some kind of perspective on why today's outfit is so momentous to me! Finally, I can spend the day in a short and sleeveless dress! Finally I can wear high heels! I was so thrilled at my opportunity to dress snazzy again that I broke a rule (the rule that says I can't get out my summer clothes until it's been warm for a week) and broke out a pair of sandals that I purchased a few weeks ago on eBay.

I guess it's not really breaking the rule if the sandals were never in storage in the first place, but these sandals were worth breaking the rules for—these are sky-high, velvet platforms with 4-color rainbow stripes on the heels and buckles! When I first tried them on, I learned by accident that they looked pretty awesome with black socks underneath, so I did what I haven't tried since 2013 and rocked the socks-and-sandals look!

 

Since I was celebrating my liberation from the Dowdy Life, I went for over-the-top color with a bold purple dress, orange headband, and bright yellow earrings. In the morning, I covered it all up with a simple black cardigan, but I ditched that Sensible Sweater as soon as I could!

 

A Red Wedding

 

My boyfriend and  were invited to two wedding celebrations for the same couple (some people just don't know when to stop!), and I was pretty stoked to have two opportunities to dress fancy within a month! The instant I heard the news, I began planning my outfits and quickly decided on two green dresses.

Then we got the official invitation. My heart fell when my boyfriend told me that the bride and groom requested that we wear red. Red! Now, red has its time and place, but when you have your heart set on a green dress, red can throw a real wrench into your plans.

Then I actually read the official invitation. It didn't say we had to wear head-to-toe red, and it didn't say we had to wear red at all; all it said was something along the lines of "We'd be honored if you wear something – even a tiny accessory – that's red." And they were having a red fashion show!

Well! That turned this dress code suggestion from a disappointing restriction into a fashion challenge! And you all know how much the Unfashionista loves a challenge!

Since I didn't feel like buying a whole red dress, what red accessories did I have in my wardrobe, and what dress could I wear with them?

Funny you should ask!

I had recently purchased a party dress from the thrift store for 5 dollars. It was a pink, cream, and burgundy paisley pattern, and I felt it would go well with a variety of shades of red. I tried it on with my trusty red hand-me-down blazer (which has unexpectedly turned into quite the wardrobe workhorse), and it was a hit!

As for shoes, I was torn among several pairs: pastel pink (cute, but really tall and uncomfortable), burgundy (classic, but a little beat-up, and I worried it would compete with the red in the blazer), and cream lace (not even a shade of red, also very unstable and liable to fall off, but looked so cute with the dress!). I ultimately decided my ability to dance at the reception was more important than having the perfect shoes, so I went with the good old burgundy ones.

Next decision was whether to wear classy silver jewelry or gaudy red earrings. Since I am who I am, I'm sure you can guess which route I took. If you're going to go red, you might as well go all the way!

I strutted my stuff on the wedding runway along with the other red-bedecked guests, received effusive compliments from the bride (I'm sure she said that to all the girls!), had a grand old time, and now look forward eagerly to the next occasion, which will be my first beach wedding!

Shades of Midnight

This afternoon, I had a follow-up treatment scheduled on my left leg. After the procedure, I knew I would have another 6 days of wearing compression stockings, so I wanted to make the most of my last few hours of freedom—i.e. go barelegged for the last time in a long time.

Fortunately, I had this outfit at the ready, consisting of a below-the-knee skirt and calf-high boots. Everything in the outfit is in shades of blue and purple.

I was also able to put my hair in a ponytail for the first time since getting it cut short in December. Woohoo! Infinite styling options are now at my fingertips! Fun hair should help make up for the week of boring pants that surely awaits me.

 

In other good news, I only have to wear the compression stocking for 5 days this time.