Crappy suck crappyness
I’m having a bad couple of days, emotionally. Well, emotionally I’m alright I think, but my self esteem which is barely there at the best of times has been utterly erased. Utterly. To the point where I can’t bear the thought of walking out the door tomorrow morning to go to work. I have a class to teach in the morning, so I can’t take the day off, but I’m terrified.
At the same time, I’m incredibly annoyed with myself. I’ve been fat since I was about 11, so it’s now 20 years and surely I should have better coping mechanisms by now. I should be used to seeing skinny models and diet ads without feeling like a waste of skin, but I am not. What triggered this plummet? What else – wedding dresses.
When I shop for clothes, which I honestly do try to avoid as much as I possibly can, the first thing I ever look at is the neckline. Anything lower than a shallow scoop neck – say around t-shirt level – is instantly dismissed as unsuitable. This is because I have, thanks to PCOS, hair on my chest. Yup, I’m fuzzy and it’s probably the thing that depresses me most about my appearance. No matter how gorgeous, flattering or amazing a shirt or dress is, I will not buy it if the neckline is wrong. I simply can’t wear it.
Now, logically I know that the chances of anyone even noticing this chest fuzz are very slim, but we live in a society where billions of dollars are spent on hair removal because women who dare to be a bit beardy are subjected to humiliation on a grand scale. I often wish I was a stronger person and able to just say “Fuck you too!” but I cannot. All I can seem to do is crawl into a cave and hope it all goes away. Which it doesn’t.
So poking around for dresses starts as “Don’t any of these have a high neckline” and moves to “God I wish I could look that good” which leads to “I hate how all these women get to show cleavage” which leads to “I’m hideous and cannot have a wedding and I need to tell Matt we’re eloping so no one has to see this mess”. Not logical, and hard to escape.
I don’t actually know how to make it better though. After almost 20 years of being as covered as possible, avoiding hair dressers, dentists and doctors and giving up on swimming and other fun things, it’s difficult to now say “I don’t care any more, I’m fuzzy, YOU deal with it”. Instead I’m going to start the hair removal cycle over again. Because it’s just not okay to be a hairy woman.
Shoe Love.
I’m not, it has to be said, a girly girl. I don’t wear make up because who can be bothered getting out of bed a half hour earlier to slap paint all over themselves? Not me. I’m too busy fondling my snooze button. So I shop for clothes when it’s a dire situation, and I shop for shoes ONCE a year on average. I find a pair that fits, wear them till bits fall off them and then drag myself to the shoe shop to start the whole process again. I don’t care what’s fashionable, I just want a sturdy pair of boots with low or no heels. Done.
See, the thing about my feet is they are never bloody happy. Shoes that fit right over the toes rub the hell out of my heels, shoes that make my heels happy make my toes UNhappy. Like most people, cranky feet leads to a cranky me, so once I break in a pair of shoes I wear them till they can live no more. It also means I spend a ton of money on expensive shoes. Not because they’re handtooled italian leather made by some hermit in a mountain by the light of half a candle, but because they’re well made and I don’t have to break in a new set for a loooong time.
Which is why I’m so besotted with my Five Fingers shoes. So very in love with them. Yes okay they’re odd looking, but they’re so amazingly comfortable I could almost forgive them for being hot pink (almost).
They weigh hardly anything, they fit literally like a glove. There’s nothing to rub, chafe or bother the foot and I can wear these all day without a single pain in anything.
They’re marketed as like being barefoot, which is quite true. They have thin rubber soles, so if you stand on a rock, you’ll KNOW you’ve stood on a rock, but there’s not as much pain. They also offer no support to your foot whatsoever, which is actually not a bad thing. On pavement it gets a little tiring to the toes, but on grass or dirt the surface you’re walking on will support your foot more perfectly than any shoe can.
And yes, they’re fun to wear. They’re like being barefoot, so your step is lighter, your movements freer and the neglected muscles in your legs and feet will be working as they should. I didn’t believe that bit of marketing until I had mine on for a couple of days. Oh yes, you will work your legs in these things.
I don’t have socks for mine, but will order some when I’m back from the states, because I also very much need a red pair. Once I have my red pair, I won’t need any other shoes.
The Boyfriend asked me “you wear those on purpose?” because he has no taste in footwear. I told him I either bring these to Chicago, or he listens to me bitch about my sore feet for 2 weeks.
As an aside, when I wore these in Darwin I wandered past a group of Aboriginal men. One of them pointed at my feet and shouted “Hey, hey, what are those shoes??” I said “They’re like being barefoot!”. The entire group laughed and the guy said “Why don’t you just BE barefoot?”. I shook my head “I’m too white!” I replied. 
Saturday Bedspread Day
Fairly full day today. Matt is back from his holiday (no I will not say vacation) so I got to hang out with him properly this morning rather than at the mercy of the phone godlets. Then Mum and I went to Savers because she saw a shirt there yesterday that would go with the skirt I cut out last night. Sadly, someone else had nabbed it, but I managed to pick up a few nice shirts, couple new pairs of jeans and 2 headscarves as well as more ties for my tie skirt project.
Once I got home and tossed the new stuff into the wash, I settled down to make me another skirt from a bedspread I picked up at Savers months ago. I’ve been meaning to make this forever. Again, it’s a cheaty hem (I kept the decorative hem on the edges). It wasn’t originally going to be a jeans top, but as I was sewing I realised that the jeans I had on were REALLY overdue for throwing out. Knees and inner thighs were gone, and I was keeping them around as spares, so I took em off and hacked the waistband off to use here. This is good because I am not good at waist bands, so reusing the jeans was handy. The legs are in the ragbag waiting for something to be used for.
So, overall, a productive little day. Hope yours was goodly too 
The Cheater Guide to Good Hems
I suck at hems. I really seriously do, I am terrible at them. I have two skirts currently shoved in a cupboard until I can be bothered trying again to make with the non droopy hemline. Which may explain why I prefer to hack other things to bits to make skirts out of.
Peek at the picture (you can click to see the full sized one, we have the technology). The waist “band” is an old pair of jeans, and the panels are made from the legs of several pairs of cords. I love how this came out, and I LOVE that I was able to cheat totally on the hemline and simply use the prehemmed bottoms of the cords legs.
The major tip I will pass on to you is if you ARE going to recycle the hems of an existing something, when you sew your panels together, sew from the bottom up. That way you can match your hems perfectly, even if you’ve been a bit slapdash with the measurements of your panels (which I always am). You can fix any unevenness in the topedge very easily when you sew your waist section on, it’s a lot harder to tidy up mismatched hems.
As for making the above skirt, it’s really just a gored skirt but with the top measurement for the gores taken from the width of the bottom of the jeans section, if that makes sense. I’ll try that again. Instead of measuring your waist and dividing by X number of panels, you cut the legs off the jeans and measure the width of the new hole, then divide that.
To find the maximum width of your gores, measure the bottoms of the legs of the cords, and pick the narrowest. These gores are cut on the seam to give me extra width, but if you like you can cut down the leg. Narrower gores, less of a seamed look. Up to you.
I’m not going to go into technical detail here, simply because when I made this thing I ended up with a spare gore, so I’m clearly not the person you should be seeking advice from. Apart from the hem tip, that’s awesome advice :nods: