Bolero

 

The focus of today's outfit is obviously the shoes!

Look at them! Just look at them! But don't ask me how long it took to put them on.

OK, I'll tell you. 20 minutes! They are impossible to slide on my feet unless I loosen all the laces. Then I have to re-tighten all the laces, taking extra care that they stay the right length on each side and that they don't get twisted at any point (because they are flat, they look deformed if they twist). I foresee very little wear actually happening with these splendid but very labor-intensive shoes. As much as I love everything-lace-up, I might have to remove the laces from these babies, just so that I can put them on and still get anywhere on time.

But I digress.

If the focus of today's outfit were not the shoes, it would be the simple and unassuming bolero that I have worn on my shoulders. It's nothing to get excited about—it doesn't fit great, and it suffers from no small amount of pilling and age-related scruffiness. But I did make it myself, so the rest of this post will be dedicated to the process by which I accomplished it.

I started with an old black cardigan handed down to me by a friend. This one was a little difficult to get on over my arms (I never thought I had fat elbows, but after trying a couple of XS sweaters, I'm beginning to believe that could be a thing), and it had the aforementioned obvious signs of old age. I had enough black cardigans already, so I figured I would use it for some kind of DIY project. When I realized one day that it would be really nice to have a bolero (which, like many things in fashion can be defined in various ways, but in my book is like a shrug, except it basically covers only the shoulders and not the chest) for those days when I want to wear a summer dress, but don't want my arms to freeze. An ordinary cardigan frequently covers up too much of the dress and looks frumpy, but a bolero would allow me a much more streamlined silhouette.

So I grabbed this old and somewhat worn sweater and decided it was a great candidate for experimental surgery.

First, I wrapped it around my body and pinned the approximate area where I thought the two sides should meet in the back.

I sewed a quick-and-dirty seam across the bottom of the ribbing at its new center.

From here, I was stumped as to how to convert the rather baggy back portion of the cardigan into a fitted bolero. Many false starts occurred. At one point, I lopped off most of the bottom just so I'd have less excess fabric getting in my way.

 

Then, because the front didn't seem to be fitting around my arms as I'd hoped, I disconnected the ribbing from the sweater entirely so I could trim off more fabric (in retrospect, I could have left a little bit attached at the neck area to save myself some work later).

 

 

I used pins to mark a line where I wanted the new front edges to be, then cut off around them, leaving a seam allowance to reattach the ribbing.

After a few more slight adjustments, I was happy with the way the front looked.

The back, however, was still too loose. I smoothed the ragged edges off the bottom and trimmed it shorter, which helped. Then to get rid of the remaining excess, I decided to put a few gathers into the back when re-attaching the ribbing.

So, finally, I reattached the ribbing!

 

That was the end of this project! While it still looks scruffy, I can fix some of that with a good old-fashioned razor, and should have a polished-looking bolero just in time for spring!

Mustard Monday

 

There are two days of the work week when I tend to dress up in clothes that are more fancy and fun: Monday, because it rhymes with Funday, and Friday, because it starts with F. OK, really it's because on Mondays I could really use a pick-me-up to help motivate me to start my workweek, and Fridays are casual days according to office codes everywhere, thus affording the best opportunity to wear more exciting fashion! Of course, there is also the fact that I have all of Sunday to come up with an outfit for Monday, so my Monday outfits have no excuse to be lame and boring.

Today's Monday outfit is one of my favorites. I got these yellow fur-trimmed boots on eBay for 18 dollars. They inject more bright sunshine into an outfit than any other winter accessory I can think of, and today, when I woke up to snow on the ground, cloudy skies, and a temperature of only 31 degrees, bright sunshine was desperately needed.

To add to the brightness, I chose my orange paisley tunic. With its vivid warm colors (including one that's very close to, but not quite, mustard yellow), it nicely coordinated with the boots. Some sparkly copper jewelry added a little more flash.

With my body comfortably ensconced in this cheery ensemble, I felt ready to take on a week of workplace woe!

Frankensweater

One of the sweaters that I optimistically added to my collection last summer was a loosely knit white sweater marled with burgundy. Back then, when I was just coming out of a cold season marked by entirely too few fun things to wear, I thought a cropped sweater a size too big was a good idea. This fall, in the harsh light of I-already-have-a-closet-full-of-sweaters, it seemed like a very bad one indeed. However, I'd already spent 3 dollars (plus tax!) on the abomination, and I was unlikely to get that much back on eBay, so I decided to make lemonade out of my lemon. I liked the color and the knit; I just needed some way to get it to a usable length.

Enter one of the hand-me-down sweaters that I'd reserved just for refashioning purposes! This burgundy hooded sweater was cute enough, but at an XS, it fit a little too close for comfort, and the holes decorating the front panel made it quite breezy—not exactly my first choice for winter wear. I figured I could combine parts of both sweaters to make one sweater that would be both long enough and warm enough.

I decided to attach the bottom portion of the red sweater to the top portion of the marled sweater to add the necessary length. 

So I chopped top off the red one...

...And the the bottom off the marled one! 

Because the marled sweater was a rather loose boxy shape and the red one was extra small and fitted, the two portions did not line up nicely.

I decided to use the last few inches of the red sleeves to add more width to the bottom portion, which gave me so much extra fabric that I figured I'd gather it at the join for a kind of skirted look.

Meanwhile, I wanted the top to have a more fitted look, so I trimmed a bit off the sides and sewed new seams.

From the red sweater, I separated the front from the back, removed the side seams from the sleeve ends, and joined all four pieces together in one long strip. You can see some obvious signs of salvage work here: the ribbed hems of the sleeves are shorter than those of the sweater body; I also, on the back, accidentally put the wrong side out (but decided to keep it that way because it wasn't too noticeable and the wrong side was actually in slightly better condition).

Then it came time to attach the two portions together at the waist! I basted them together at 4 critical points – the middle of the front, the middle of the back, and both side edges – then used the machine to finish the job. Of course I made tons of mistakes, including sewing the entire bottom half on inside-out, so I had to pick out my seam and start over!

On the front half of the sweater, I stretched the upper portion as I sewed to make it line up appropriately with the bottom portion. Midway through, I took it out of the machine for some reason and noticed that I hated the way it looked, because the marled portion never really snapped back the way I'd expected it too, so it instead looked kind of wavery and stretched-out.

So for the back and sides of the sweater, I just placed some strategic gathers into the wider red portion, which turned out to be a much better choice.

Since the sweater still didn't fit around the waist as tidily as I'd hoped, and the front was downright stretched out, I added a strip of elastic all around the waist. 

It helped, but I still would prefer a tighter, flatter waist, so I think at some point, I'll probably try to redo it by either tightening the elastic or putting more gathers in the front skirted portion (or both!). But for now, I am willing to settle.

Now I've never really been a fan of the colorblocked look (to me, the different-colored top and bottom just scream cobbled-together!), so to add a little continuity throughout the piece, I added some decorative touches.

I unraveled a length of yarn from the marled sweater, braided it, and tied it into a bow which I then stitched to the middle of the waistband.

I cut a strip off the edge of the hood of the red sweater and used it to decorate the ends of the sleeves.

I feel like this breaks up the huge swathes of color and makes the whole sweater look more like a unified piece.

 

 Done! And worn with burgundy boots for an artfully tonal color scheme!

The longest vest

 

Almost a year ago, I got an idea that I would like an old full-length button-front dress to wear as a vest. This wasn't really my own idea; I saw some bloggers do it and thought it was a cool way to restyle un-stylish clothes.

The idea was a long time in the fulfillment, as I had to wait until I found a suitable dress for a reasonable price at the thrift store. "Reasonable" was not 7.99$, but after months of searching, when I finally found this one, bright red and festooned with black and white roses at that price, I got it anyway. I'm sure it was at least 25% off (because I never shop at the thrift store when there's not a sale going on), so there was that. It took me several more months before I was actually able to wear it (Alphabet dressing getting in the way, among other things).

The first time I tried to make an outfit with it, I wore black pants and a black shirt under it, and it looked so horrible, I gave up and stuffed it back into the closet for a couple weeks. I thought I might have to wait until summer when I could wear it without sleeves underneath.

But then I gave it one more chance, replacing the pants with a short skirt, and it instantly looked better! (I also tied the adjustable tie at the back to make it fit a little less loosely on top, which helped). 

Since temperatures are only in the 40's today, I had to wear over-the-knee boots, but even with my legs 90% covered up, that little swathe of thigh between the skirt and the boots makes all the difference that the pants just couldn't achieve. Weird how these things work.

Anyway, I look pretty dramatic when I walk down the hallways with my oversized vest billowing behind me like a cape. It makes me feel confident and excited about life. So I'm glad I decided to wear this outfit for "Friday Funday!" 

 

Here's how it looks when it's not billowing like a cape:

You might think this post is all about me and my impeccable thrifting sense, but there's so much more going on behind the scenes. Let's zoom out, shall we?

This creeper is what I have to put up with every time I take a picture of myself at home! That is, unless I make him hold the camera. Then I get nothing but close-ups of my boobs.

Fade to lavender

With Thrift Store Formals and Winery Excursions galore, I've been on an outfit roll!

But with the arrival of my first day of work after the long weekend, I felt my momentum "roll" to a stop. Dressing for work is, by nature, much less exciting. I needed to inject some interest into my work clothes!

I decided to take advantage of the 50+ degree forecast yesterday and wear something that doesn't cover my legs (Gasp! What an adventure!), and that ended up being my trusty purple pleather pencil skirt (almost as much fun to say as it is to wear)!

I'd previously tested the skirt out with a slightly lighter purple shirt, so I went that route and tried to decide on shoes. I was tempted to go with still more purple, but enough is enough after all—besides, my purple boots only go up to mid-calf, and it wasn't as warm as all that!

It occurred to me that with a dark purple skirt and a light purple shirt, I had sort of a gradient going, so it might be cool if I went even darker on my legs. Black boots were the answer! The now-3-level gradient inspired me to find something even lighter purple to wear above my shirt, and my scarf collection did not disappoint. To top it all off (in a  literal sense this time!) I found a pair of pastel purple heart earrings, which actually look completely clear in some light.

So my overall outfit goes black, dark purple, medium purple, light purple, extremely light purple! I'm a walking gradient, only slightly marred by the hair, which remains tenaciously green in spite of having last been dyed over 2 months ago. That's enough, hair. It's time to move on.

Merlot

It was Martin Luther King Junior Day, and the time for trying to do something fun on our day off that is normally a day at work was upon us!

My boyfriend had heard from his sister that she wanted to go to a winery, so he picked out a place that the three of us could go for a tasting—Stone Tower Winery.

Naturally, to an Unfashionista, the only point of going out is to get dressed up. so I picked out the snazziest outfit that my winter wardrobe could cough up.

Mainly, I wanted to wear the ridiculously flared jeans I'd picked up just a couple weeks ago, so I picked out an outfit that worked around them. Annoyingly, not only are they so flared you could fit two legs in them side by side, they are also so long, you could nearly fit two people in them top to bottom. At some point, I'll have to hem them, but today I just wore them with my tallest platform booties and hoped for the best. Typically a winery is a little too rustic (read, possessed of too many rocky paths and strange surfaces) for a pair of 4-inch wedges, but we do what we must when we wish to be fashionable. Fortunately I did not fall over at any point during the day.

In addition to wanting to wear my flashy flares for some time, I'd also been feeling a notable lack of hats in my daily attire. Today, I decided, it was time to change. I had a new wool (or rather, wooly-looking fleece) hat with a red crown and black brim that I'd picked up for 3 dollars in the summer which was desperately in need of being worn.

To make it look sensible with the overall look, I added a burgundy sweater, and then tied everything together with some similarly hued lip stain. In the epitome of appropriateness, I'd picked an almost entirely burgundy / merlot / bordeaux-colored outfit, for a trip to a winery! In the epitome of irony, I only drink white wine!

Today also marks the day that I first got to wear the velvet choker that I made for myself. Lacking any hardware for assembling a choker, I simply used Velcro to hold the two ends together, and no one was any the wiser—or if they were, they wisely didn't mention it.

Um, we brought the dogs, so that should explain the white hairs all over the brim of my black hat!

Thrift Store Formal

 
On Sunday morning, I got up and was dutifully scrolling through my emails when I noticed something pop up on my twitter feed. Thrift Store Formal. Tonight. For free!

Two of my favorite things are shopping at thrift stores and getting all decked out in formal attire, so I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I had to go to this event.

I had the perfect dress already—a glitter-coated dress in two graduated shades of blue, complete with a frilly side seam and a weird ankle length that flatters no one. I had picked it up on eBay because I'm a sucker for glitter and gradients, but had no idea where I was going to wear it without looking like a fool...until I learned about the Thrift Store Formal.

My boyfriend and I gussied ourselves up, myself in everything glittery I could get my hands on, including a pink evening bag with the $2.99 tags still on (I thought that was a nicely tacky touch), and headed to the Dew Drop Inn..

Of course, when I actually got there, I was instantly intimidated by the seedy vibe. From the outside, it looked like the kind of place gambling addicts go to die. The interior was only slightly improved by the flock of 2-year-olds toddling around. I was out of my element, but my boyfriend claims to love dive bars, so we stayed until 10:00. Still, we left before we could even enter ourselves into the "king and queen" contest.

Oh well, at least I got to wear this awkwardly sized and outlandishly sparkly dress, because I don't think I could ever proudly wear it anywhere else.