snowy weekends

The first snowflakes of the winter fell much of yesterday afternoon. It was really pretty to watch, although bitterly cold and I dreaded having to deal with the campus lot today with the aftermath. :p It wasn't much accumulation though, so that was good! I snapped a couple, quick (and very badly done) pictures from inside the warm house. :)

Walk into my room on any given day and you’re sure to see little piles of clothes that aren’t my dirty laundry. Most are recent thrift finds, waiting to be sorted between washing and sending to the dry cleaner, but still others are earmarked for alteration. I admit that, as the old saying goes, my eyes are bigger than my time, so the average wait time is about 4 months (at least). Recently though, spurred by the desire to have a short jacket (since all I seem to have accumulated are coats... hmm... must remedy this!), having spied several fetching ones on a recent shopping trip, I went through my “stash”. My hands pulled out a vintage Bill Blass bomber-style jacket in a black and white houndstooth. I bought it because I liked the material and thought I could possible work with it (and if not, I still liked the fabric... lol), but the style was decidedly dated. Huge shoulders propped up with even bigger shoulder pads (I kid you not; these things were massive when I pulled them out!), the back waistband gathered with elastic and shiny gold metal buttons on the breast pocket flaps and closure. See for yourself:


So I started to pin, dart, rip, take out; generally wreak havoc with my seam ripper and stash of pins. I pinned my first ideas in place, namely darting the shoulders and shortening the sleeves:


Those changes just weren’t doing it for me, so I took out the elastic, ripped off the pocket flaps (those were actually just for show, there were no breast pockets) and decided to loose the cuff for the sleeves and shorten those to slightly above the hem of the jacket. Suddenly I had the swing topper I had been coveting! Here was my second “pin fitting”:


A little stitching here, cutting there and lots of ironing, and voila! Much improved, don’t you think?


(I did take some pictures of me modeling the jacket, the lot of which overall didn't turn out. I uploaded one to Flickr, just in case you're curious to see how it looks on a person. ;)


What I love best about revamping old clothes is not only breathing new life into something formerly demode or just plain ugly, but the fact that I’m taking part in a centuries-old tradition of remodeling old clothes. It not only helps fill my closet with clothes that I otherwise couldn’t have, but remodeling is a form of recycling (which is one of my pet subjects lately anyway...)!


The cabled bolero from the current issue of Vogue Knitting is coming along very nicely, despite frogging the first pentagon twice. First time I dropped a stitch and couldn’t find where, second time I decided after looking at the finished garment sizes I need to choose another size (note to self: pay attention to the text before the pattern next time! lol!!). Its actually a quick, easy knit; I like the rhythm of the decreases every-other-row. I have to say I’m excited to see this finished. ;)