Throwback Thursday

Between the Stash Diet/Stashbusting Sewalong efforts, and the Wardrobe Architect challenges, I've been in the mood lately to take a good, long look at my closet and see what maybe doesn't belong there anymore. A lot of the things I've been pulling out so far are thrifted or RTW items, but I've also found a few things I made that mostly predate my blogging days. So, I figured I'd feature them for a moment here before I repurpose them.

1. The denim jacket, circa 2005 (I think). This is the coat that my Robson is replacing. I made it using a slightly shortened version of a Vogue coat pattern (1266). It hasn't aged well, as far as denim jackets go--instead of looking broken-in and casual like the more traditionally-styled ones do, it just looks faded in all the wrong places. You can probably see those collar wrinkle fade marks all the way from here.

The lining is still in good condition, though. I love all of the fun colors in this fabric!










2. The retro skirt, circa 2006. This one was actually one of the first things I shared on this blog, though not in much detail, since it was only my second post and all I did was mention some things I'd made over the previous summer. (Incidentally, aside from this skirt, the only things in that post that I still have are the bag and the long wrap skirt. I occasionally pull out the bag for days that I don't need to carry much weight, because I can't bring myself to get rid of the hand-painted panel but it won't hold up to more. And I do still wear the wrap skirt fairly regularly during the summers.) My original intention was to wear this skirt for my grad school graduation, but I was too busy with classes and such to finish it in time. So I finished it up the following summer. I still think this fabric is really fun, but the proportions of the skirt were never quite right. (Or the fit, if the way the waistline just hangs off of Donna is any indication.) I tried to draft my own pattern, and it didn't work out well. So then I used McCall's 4783 for the yoke, and I should really just ditch that pattern because the yoke is too wide and it means there's a seam right on the widest part of my hips. Not flattering. And then it ended up too short, which is why there's that white band on the bottom. Which is now somewhat dingy-looking.

I do still think the piped faux pockets are a cute detail, and I may have to revisit that one sometime, but they'd work out a lot better if they were several inches higher. And stopped curling. If I do revisit this, interfacing would probably not be a bad thing.






3. The Japanese maxi-skirt. I think this one was one of the few things I actually managed to crank out in college, which would put it around 2002-2003. I still like the skirt, honestly. It's Simplicity 7097, which I've used for another project or two over the years. Even though it's straight, it has a slit that's a good length for me to still be able to move freely. And I think the fabric is really fun. According to the website where I bought it, the symbols are kanji for "moon". The thing is, I only wear this skirt maybe once a year, tops. It's partly that I don't really have anything to wear with it, other than black tops. Though 3/4 of the colors are definitely in my palette, the red is what stands out to me and gives me mental blocks on wearing it. The other thing is, I love prints that evoke other cultures, but I often feel a little weird wearing them as a white girl of primarily German/UK descent. It's like I have this subconscious fear that, say, I'll offend my students that come from Asian families if I wear a skirt with Japanese writing. It's probably weird, and my thought line is more "I like this thing about your culture well enough to borrow it for my wardrobe", but it's still there.

Rather than just pass these on to the thrift store, I'm going to recycle them here. I'm in the very beginning stages of planning a quilt, and spent a snow day chopping up smaller pieces of cotton prints and old muslins to do so. So since they're all quilting cotton prints (I'm thinking the lining of the coat, not the denim), why not add them? This thing's probably going to take me 5 years to make anyway, so I might as well include little pieces of my fashion history.

Plus, you know, free fabric, and I can hoard the zippers and buttons for future projects. I love free stuff!

And yes, I am sewing. Though I'm at a bit of a standstill for March of the Shieldmaidens while I wait for dye to arrive/frantically try to finish the sewn part of a gift before a baby shower next weekend. With any luck, I should be able to start this costume by April...

Gotta be going to that thrift store in the sky....

Now that I have "Beauty School Dropout" firmly stuck in my head...

Knowing that I'm going to be moving in less than a year is making me take a good, long look at my possessions. I'm going to have to start being honest with myself about whether I'll really wear this, use up that piece of fabric, ever read that book, etc. I think it will be good for me, because like so many crafty people, I have hoarder tendencies.

So now that it's the end of the summer, I'm in the process of eliminating the things that I ended up not wearing, or that just don't work anymore. And since some of the things I've culled so far are handmade things that predated the blog, I'd like to give them their moment before I say goodbye. If these pictures look a little weird, it's because I was too lazy to scan things on a separate computer and email them to myself/crop/etc, so I've resorted to taking pictures of my previous pictures of these me-mades. How meta. As you can see, my hair hasn't changed much in the last decade.

Item #1: The bamboo dress
This one is a little unusual for me. Despite my teenage wish that my mom had kept more of her things from the 70s, I've kept very few of the things that I wore myself. Since I've been very blessed to not have had much weight fluctuation since then (except for a cup size or 2....) it's probably due to a lifetime of limited closet space and still wanting to sew new things. So this dress is pretty much the last thing I have left from high school. And it's held up surprisingly well, despite the fact that I've worn it at least once or twice every summer since then, and I had no thought at all for things like seam finishes when I was 17ish. I'm going to estimate that I made this one around 1998, and thanks to a little scrapbook project I did right around the end of college, I can confidently say that the pattern was Butterick 5046. It's some kind of linen-looking stuff, but I'm sure it's not linen because it's from Joann's. I tried to wear it this summer, not too long ago. And it just looked uncomfortably short to me--I wonder if it finally shrank some in the wash, since I certainly haven't gotten taller? But considering that I made it nearly half a lifetime ago, I think it's had a good run, and I hope it will make some thrifter very happy.


Item #2: The paisley shirt

This was my one foray into vintage fabric. At least, I'm pretty sure it's vintage. My mom occasionally gets donations of fabric from people cleaning out their stashes, and she passes along what she can't use for quilts to me. This one was a cotton, but it was a little thin for a quilt, so I turned this one into a shirt. It was from summer 2002, and the pattern was New Look 6598. Not the most flattering top on me, since it was kind of shapeless under the badly-placed empire waist, but I liked the fabric so I've worn it on a regular basis for almost every summer anyway. I'd probably keep this one, honestly, except for the fact that the fabric around the elasticised armholes has just gotten too worn out. There's all these little frayed-edge holes. So I can't even really give this one away. I may keep it and try to turn it into the lining for a cute little bag or something, because it would really be a shame to just throw it out.

Item #3: The Hawaiian surplice top

So this is me giving my Singin' in the Rain impression! (Yes, it was raining a bit at the time.) In the couple of years right after finishing college, I rather casually dabbled in the swing-dancing subculture. It was something I'd wanted to learn how to do ever since my early teenage years, thanks to that Gap khakis commercial that was really popular for awhile and the movie Swingkids. And I had a couple of friends who were, and still are to some extent, really into it. So back in 2005, two friends and I took a day trip to Washington, DC for the dual purposes of general sightseeing fun and a swing dance event called the Under The Sea Ball. Since it was supposed to have a beachy/tropical feel to it, and I wanted something that I could also walk around for the day comfortably in (it was hot!), I decided to go for a cotton, somewhat retro-styled top. I already had this Hawaiian print in my stash from...something...I can't remember how I got this piece, to be honest. I was actually really proud of how this top turned out, because I basically drafted the pattern myself. I based it off of this dress-to-top refashion, because I really liked the fit and the v in the back, and used masking take to more or less get the shape of the pieces. Then I altered the top above the empire waist to be a surplice. I added the white in there afterwards--just a scrap of white knit from an old t-shirt that I tacked in to be a fake camisole. I still like the style and the kind of crazy Hawaiian print, actually, so the main reason I'm getting rid of this is that the last couple of times I've tried to wear it this summer, it feels uncomfortably small around the armholes. I don't know if they were cut too high to begin with, or if I gained weight in some really weird place, or if I've just gotten much pickier about the fit of my me-mades in the last year or so and so those armholes just don't feel good. I think I still have my drafted pattern, though, so I would definitely consider lowering the cut of those armholes a bit and sewing something similar to this again. Though I'd probably leave out the fake camisole in favor of a real one, or find a way to build one in better.

I hope you enjoyed this little walk down memory lane! I actually have several more pictures of old makes that predated my digital camera, so I would like to get these up here sometime. Also, I'm getting quite close to wrapping up not one, but two projects! So with any luck, I may have something new to show by the end of the week.

ETA: Looks like I'm going to have to add last summer's Frankenblouse to the list.  Despite my having pre-washed it, the fabric seems to have shrank in the wash, and it's now too short to look decent with any pants that I own, camisole or not. Also, the metallic stripes have gotten pulls all over it, and despite my having done French seams for greater durability, I'm noticing holes all along the bustline where the stitching is. Rats. Oh well... I wasn't totally thrilled with how that one turned out anyway, tbh, so I may have to just try the concept again with a slightly different pattern mix. And more durable fabric. Preferably that isn't so sheer and ivory that the only thing I can wear under it is my off-white camisole that has been washed and worn so many times that it, too, needs replacing. (I haven't been able to find one, or had the time to make one, yet.) This one is also not going to be in decent enough condition to give away, so I think I'll just salvage the buttons and be done with it.

The Personal Style Project, phase 1 cont. : Fashion flashback!

As mentioned in yesterday's post, one of the most helpful resources I've found so far in trying to figure out how to define my personal style is a guide on retrochick.co.uk. So I'm working through that. It's a little cold (and dark) to take a walk, and I have sort of started with the lookbook thing. But what looked like the most fun suggestion on the first main section of the guide was to think about what you wore as a teenager, when you "weren’t dressing for anyone else." And that sounded like a fun post topic! So bring on the '90s flashback!

Admittedly, I didn't quite have total freedom of what to wear as a teen...my school had a fairly strict dress code. No blue jeans, no printed t-shirts, no spaghetti straps, no backless sandals, nothing really tight or skin-baring or overly short (the "skirts no shorter than 4" above the knee when kneeling" rule was one of my main inspirations for sewing my own, since being one of the taller girls in the class, it was hard to find skirts that worked with that!) But in a way, I think that kind of forced some creativity on me--how to express myself within limits, especially since I was the girl who hated having brand names plastered on my clothing and really didn't want to dress like all of the Aberzombie-field hockey-playing preps.

But here's what I did end up wearing... I wish I had pictures, but sadly, I don't have too many pics of either what I made or wore on a day-to-day basis back then. Most of my teenage pics are from things like school semi/formal events and retreats where we all wore bummy clothes.

• During my earliest teen years, usually what I wore was the colored jeans we were allowed to wear (black most often, or the weirder colors like hunter green and brick) and either huge baggy sweaters, or huge baggy plaid shirts over top of other stuff. I also remember that there was a year (I think it was 8th grade) when I wore black hiking boots all the time... I really wanted a pair of Doc Martens, but they were out of my budget, so that was my cheap substitute. Honestly, at this point it wasn't entirely a fashion statement, even though this was when the grunge look was pretty popular. It was more a way to cover up as much as possible, since I was still one of the curvier girls in the class at the time (especially compared to all the skinny, petite, athletic future Aberzombies....I was never overweight, but I looked it compared to them) and was rather self-conscious about it.
• Believe it or not, the turning point for me was an article in a teen magazine about thrift shopping. I'd always figured that was a way for people who couldn't afford to shop at the mall to get clothes before that...it never occurred to me that it could be a good way to find unique items! (Besides, this was the age where my parents were basically setting a budget for me and saying I had $X to spend on clothes for the year and anything above that was coming out of my own pocket....so then I could get more for my money!) So somewhere during 8th grade, I started going to Goodwill every time I could convince my mom to take me. (She wasn't a fan.)
• So now onto the fun part...what I actually wore. During school days, my pants weren't really much to speak of, since I was still limited to the colored jeans and khakis. I lived in blue jeans during weekends and days off, though! My absolute favorite pair was a pair of faded flared Paris Blues jeans with a bleached-out looking butterfly print going up the legs--I remember they cost about $30 and I thought they were so expensive but I couldn't pass them up. (There's my thrift store junkie mentality at work!) I wore them until they got ridiculously faded and threadbare, somewhere in my early college years.
• Funky skirts were a staple for me, too. Particularly long ones. My go-to favorite was a black, grey and white swirl-printed long polyester skirt, which I often paired with metallic silver boots and a metallic silver pleather jacket! (My best friend's younger sister borrowed that entire outfit when the 7th and 8th graders, who shared a building with the high school, decided they wanted a Spirit Week with dress-up days too and had "Future Day".) I also had two favorites that I made, both also long--the first was a royal blue wrap skirt with a cartoonish hippie-looking allover daisy print in white, lavender, light blue and this weird chartreuse-ish green, and the other was a sheer (and fully lined) stripey sort of print alternating this brown almost woodgrain stripe and a silvery leopard print with these large orchid-type flowers printed on it and metallic floral stuff woven into it. (Man, I wish I had pics of these...though I think I actually do have one of the wrap skirt somewhere, since I still had that one at the end of college when I realized I should be taking pics of this stuff.)
• There was this phase, particularly in the 8th-10th grade range, where I wore a lot of vests. Usually homemade ones. The three I remember the most clearly were: 1) a black cotton parrot print that I hand-sewed colorful seed beeds to outline the parrots with. (I also had matching huge dangly seed bead earrings that I made to go with.) 2)Another cotton print, this one being a blue and green print that made me think of water. Probably highly toxic water, given that yellowish-green stripe bit... 3) The clincher: I made a cropped vest with a vintage pattern that my mom still had from the 70s. (She was sewing back then too.) Out of snakeskin-printed vinyl that I found in her stash. (Probably also from the 70s.) Worst finishing job ever--it was unlined, and if you looked inside, you could see the pattern piece descriptions and numbers written in there because I traced out the pattern pieces on the vinyl and didn't think to put that information closer to the edges, where it would be hidden with the seams and facings!
• Vintage-looking jackets were also a favorite of mine. Two of my favorites were actually found on that very first Goodwill run in 8th grade--one was a lightweight brown leather (or probably pleather), and the other was a black velveteen with patch pockets and a nice fat collar, which were $10 apiece and enough to sell me on the joys of thrifting. (The black one was also one I wore until the lining literally rotted out of the jacket sometime in college-I think I also tore it across the back too, since it wasn't quite wide enough for my shoulders.) I also had a couple of jackets left over from my mom's 70s wardrobe, both of which she made--one was a teal velveteen with a shawl collar, and the other was a brown tweedy sort of fabric. I remember thinking it unusual that it was also shot through with turquoise and orange bits, but honestly, I've never had a brown blazer that was as versatile as that one was. If it hadn't always been a little too small and short in the sleeves, I'd probably still have it. (Honestly, I wish I still had it anyway. I hope it went to a good thrifter's home and that she loved it.) The last one is an orangeish-tannish leather hip-length coat with piping and leather-covered buttons that's either chocolate brown or black--it's hard to tell--also my mom's from the 70s. But I was smarter about this one--even though it's also a little too short for my arms, I realized I will never find a leather vintage coat that awesome for anything I can afford again, and I still own it. And wear it often on the in-between seasons. I just wish I hadn't taken off the belt loops and trenchcoat-esque belt when I was in high school--I hated it then, but I bet I'd love it now.
• (And hey, look, I actually do have a pic of this! From about 2 years ago. Actually, I really like this outfit all together, and I even match the 70s decor in the boba tea shop!)
• Shoes were my fashion nemesis. (Actually, shoes are still my fashion nemesis.) Mainly because I have very wide, and therefore hard-to-fit, feet. This is when I got into wearing boots a lot. And I did have my old-school black high-top Chucks that I would doodle on with colored pens during class when I was bored. (Yeah, I only used plain black or blue ink pens when I had to--my notes were a rainbow of turquoise, purple and green ink otherwise!) Also wore those until they fell apart....I want a new pair! And this is also when I got into the Birkenstock thing--I loved that they looked hippie and actually fit my feet no problem due to the unisex factor.
• As far as accessories went, my style now is pretty much a further evolution of what I wore back then-- silver over gold, dangly earrings, beaded jewelry that I made myself, and rings on multiple fingers.
• I did like t-shirts in the off-school time, and tank tops in the summer--usually I'd try to go for the wider straps so I wouldn't get in trouble for anything along the "you're going out dressed like that?!" lines. During school, it was often plain but brightly colored knit tops (within the dress code--striped or tie-dyed when I could get away with it) or funky printed blouses.

I've been looking into the different style definitions too... I've suspected all along that I have a very strong boho streak, given my propensity for things like ethnic-looking prints, nature-inspired jewelry, tie-dye and long skirts, but I've been having trouble trying to figure out how to make that fit with my enduring love for things like t-shirts, hoodies, and funky but tailored-looking jackets. (See here and here.) But I had a random flash of inspiration today, and I think I might be on to something...

Speaking of hoodies, I'm really excited because I've been wanting a plain black one for awhile, and haven't been able to find one for some reason. I found one at Goodwill today, and got it for $1.75 because it was tagged with the half-off color of the week! It's a bit big in the waist, but for that price, I will gladly take my serger to it--especially since it fits perfectly around my hips!

beading it old school!

I recently went through my entire stash of jewelry--partially to untangle the huge mess of necklaces in preparation for actually getting some organization going with those, partially to see if I could find the missing half of the pair of lapis lazuli earrings that I bought while I was in Chile. (I have a habit of buying jewelry as souvenirs. Yes, I did find the missing earring, thankfully.) While I was at it, I pulled out all of the jewelry that I really didn't care if I kept or that had broken, separating it out into what I'm going to fix and what I'm going to cannibalize for parts. Most of the latter were things I made back in high school, so I thought it would be fun to do a little retrospective on some of my personal vintage crafts.

I used to do a lot more stuff with seed beads, though I prefer the chunkier ones now. But the black and white broken daisy chain necklace has a pretty funny story behind it. In my high school, there was this rule that you had to stay until the very end of the period for finals, no matter how early you finished. So knowing that my civics final was going to be ridiculously easy and I'd have lots of free time, I came prepared with this necklace that I was working on. (Figured I could still talk to friends and do that, as opposed to reading a book.) Apparently some of my classmates were fascinated by that...there was this one boy (the one that pretty much every girl in my class had a crush on at one time or other, because he was one of the better-looking and friendlier guys in the class) who asked me to show him how to do it, and then proceeded to make one of the daisies himself! Much to my amusement.

The black and red cat necklace was intended to be worn at Homecoming during my junior year, but didn't work at all with the mandarin neckline of my Chinese-style dress. So I just wore the matching earrings instead.
And then these were some of the earrings I wore a lot, along with my go-to brown necklace back then. It's hard to see, but the third earring from the left was a recycle job--one of my friends came to school one day and handed me a whole bag of jewelry that she didn't want anymore, saying she knew I'd be able to come up with something crafty to do with it. I'd probably still wear that one if I had the other earring, actually, but that one got lost. Same with the black and silver ones next to it, but the larger black beads were plastic and the finish is chipping off from use now.

So I guess compared to my more recent jewelry, it's easy to see how I've improved!