Well perhaps. I did cheat a little. And if my High School maths teacher could have seen the mess I made of taking my own measurements, he would have failed me on the spot.
I'm not sure what it is that goes wrong when I try to take my own measurements. Perhaps it's horror at the number that makes me read it differently, although in this case, the measurement ended up being way too high so I don't see how that can be the case. Perhaps I perceive myself as being bigger than I actually am (I wish this was true but I doubt it) and so see the number as being higher than it really is. Whatever it is, I ended up with a skirt that had to be made smaller.
I love the sound of that - so much so that I'm going to repeat myself:
I had to make the skirt smaller. Smaller.
It all started when I had the (crazy) idea of turning a dress into a skirt. There was nothing wrong with the dress - in fact it was a nice linen and cool to wear - but it made me look like the back of a bus. Proof:
I'm not sure what it is that goes wrong when I try to take my own measurements. Perhaps it's horror at the number that makes me read it differently, although in this case, the measurement ended up being way too high so I don't see how that can be the case. Perhaps I perceive myself as being bigger than I actually am (I wish this was true but I doubt it) and so see the number as being higher than it really is. Whatever it is, I ended up with a skirt that had to be made smaller.
I love the sound of that - so much so that I'm going to repeat myself:
I had to make the skirt smaller. Smaller.
It all started when I had the (crazy) idea of turning a dress into a skirt. There was nothing wrong with the dress - in fact it was a nice linen and cool to wear - but it made me look like the back of a bus. Proof:
I'm the one in the dress. Obviously. I have no idea who the guy is. DIL#2 took this photo as DH and I were leaving for our trip to South East Asia over a year ago. The dress was wonderful to travel in (roomy for sleeping on planes and in airports) and definitely cool in the tropics, but I always felt it made me look fat and I've tended not to wear it. (I told myself I looked far worse in the photo than usual because I was stepping up into the bus but this may or may not account for me looking larger than the bus itself.)
But as I said, it was linen and cool and I wasn't ready to throw it away just yet.
When I removed the bodice from the skirt, I discovered why it made me look so h-u-g-e from the back. There was enough fabric in the skirt to go around me twice! Look at the difference between the bodice and the skirt in the photo below now that the gathers have been removed:
No wonder I felt like I was wearing a tent!
Despite less than perfect body measurements, my tent wearing days ceased when Son#5 was born twenty one years ago. In those days, expectant mothers tended to wear, well, tents. Thankfully, that practice has changed. I think I could have enjoyed another pregnancy (apart from the all day sickness and the extreme tiredness and the aches and pains) if I had been able to wear the cute maternity wear that is around these days.
But I digress - possibly because there is nothing left to say except that I somehow successfully (I think) transferred the fabric from the dress into an A-line skirt, with a few adjustments here and there to make it smaller after my self-drafted pattern proved too big. And here again is the proof:
I'm afraid there are no photos of me wearing it. One, because I have not yet mastered the art of taking photos of myself; two, because someone has stolen all my slips/petticoats and being linen it is see-through (I suspect my next task after posting this will be to clean out the drawers in my wardrobe and see if I can discover said slips/petticoats), and three, I want to preserve the illusion that I no longer look like the back of a bus as long as possible.
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