September 14th

I felt so pretty in this outfit! With hints of classy and put-together. It's self-made pants, a striped sweater I bought off of a blog, and another necklace I liberated from my mom. Instead of doubling it or wearing it long, I knotted the necklace, which gave it a tie-ish look. I really dig ties on ladies and have been wanting to add some ties to my outfits, but it feels so much like a performance to wear one. It's only recently that I've paid much attention to what I wear anyway, and wearing something that bold kind of scares me.

We decided to take outfit pictures by the octopus because the aqua of the top and coral of the sweater I wore over it are sea colors. The octopus is on a wall in the alley near our apartment. It's pretty cool.

The pants are yet another really old project. I'm guessing 8th or 9th grade, so around 1998? Pants are tricky. I'm convinced pants-makers have access to secret fabrics that cling to the hiney in a way the fabrics available to us mere mortals never will. I think that home sewists have a better chance of success with wide-leg pants like these. I hadn't tried these on in ages, and I was pleasantly surprised with how flattering they still were. I was a bit worried I would have outgrown them, but they still fit. At the time I made them, low-rise and saggy pants were all the rage, and I desperately wanted to fit in, so I was never super happy with the high waist of these pants and probably tried to wear them further down on my hips. (I was a little skinnier then, so I might have been able to get away with it.) In retrospect, I see the absurdity of desperately wanting to fit in and somehow thinking that making my own clothes was anything other than a direct impediment to this goal. Luckily the creative, individualistic me was not nearly savvy enough not to make her own clothes anyway, and now I can wear these pants that she made.

For some reason, instead of doing a waistband facing like I did in the shirt skirt on the last post, I just turned the waistband over and did a blind hem stitch along it. Either I had to make the pants in a rush, or I was an even lazier sewist then than I am now. Maybe a little of both. Because of the corner-cutting, the waistband kind of stretches over the course of the day, but since it's generally hidden by clothes, it's no big deal.

I am in a quandary about re-hemming the pants. I think they're a bit too short. They're a couple inches too much above the ground when standing, and they look a bit comical when sitting. But the hem is actually really well-done, plus I don't know if I'd ever be able to press the fold all the way out. It's been like that for 13 years or so, after all. I think inertia will probably win, but if I ever need to wear these in a professional setting, I might re-hem them.

I'll close with a shot of Jon jumping as high as he can in front of the octopus.

Not bad, honey.