Things I couldn't do if I tried.

I'm sorely tempted by Wardrobe Refashion. Basically, you pledge for 2, 4, or 6 months not to buy clothes from a retail establishment. The idea is to work with what you have (dye, alter, etc.), to make clothes for yourself (buying fabric is okay), or to buy stuff in thrift stores and either wear it or make it into something.

You're allowed to buy ready-to-wear work clothes (but my work clothes are the same as all my other clothes), undergarments, shoes, and one item of clothing per month, but you have to post on the blog and confess.

I haven't been buying much lately in general, and I am definitely in favor of cutting back on (1) cheap items of clothing that everyone else in the world owns, and (2) items of clothing made in less-than-ideal conditions, say, by the fingers of tiny Chinese children. (No, I don't know who makes my fabric, but I'll look into it eventually.)

As for #1, one of the most surprising moments of my life was when I showed up to a wedding wearing the exact same dress as another girl. And it wasn't your basic black shift, either. I actually got really embarrassed and annoyed, a much stronger reaction than I would have thought I would feel. Erica B. blogged about this and proves that pictures are worth a thousand words. (Here at katiesews, we get the 1,000 words.)

We have a family wedding coming up. I don't want that to happen again.

I'm also trying to keep an eye on trends, since fashion is all of a sudden fascinating to me after having ignored it for, oh, 30 years of my life. And in doing this, I learned that for Fall 2007, purple is the new whatever-was-the-new-thing-last-year.

That is why I bought purple fabric to make the new and improved, smaller and all-around better pineapple dress (that's what it will always be called, no matter what fabric goes into it). I labored over this new dress with the help of my dress form, Katie Jr., adjusting pleats and pinning and basting and safety-pin sewing and trying my hardest to be worthy of wearing the season's hottest color.

When the husb got home, I tried it on for him, even though there's still no zipper because Sue made me promise not to do to this dress what I did to the last one, and that means I have to wait for her to come over and show me how to sew zippers.

He said, "Maybe you should wear that to the party."

"I want to wear it to the wedding. Purple is the new hip color, and I want to wear purple."

"You could wear that to the party, though..." (wait for it) "...and get something... nice for the wedding."

Grr!

Especially because I went to the website of the company where I bought a dress last year for a different wedding, and no lie -- out of six pages of dress options, two items are pantsuits, two are knee-length, and the rest must be stapled to the poor model's underpants. They are so. so. so. short. You can't show that much thigh at an outdoors Pacific Northwest wedding. I'm pretty sure it's just not done.

I do have another pattern and another fabric that I'm going to try to whip into a garment. This one doesn't have a zipper so it doesn't depend on Sue's whims and/or schedule. It's a really stretchy, heavy knit, though, so perhaps my next blog entry will be about my nervous breakdown caused by dealing with a stretchy, heavy knit.

Speaking of refashioning, here's an old picture of Winston wearing his tough-dog sweatshirt. It does have a heart, but it's still a tough-guy shirt because, cough, whoever appliqued the heart did a really terrible job. The actual shirt is the cut-off leg of a pair of sweatpants I cropped to be capris.

Clearly, he loves it.