Is it just me or is it going a little nutsy out there?

First before I get into the thoughts of the moment I want to tell you I appreciated your comments to my last pants post.

Thanks you for your sympathy for the shots I shared with the www of rarely viewed parts of my body. To be honest I should have been embarrassed about showing views of my pants that were less than flattering but I wasn't.

Not one bit.

Listen. 

It's not that kind of blog. Aspiring to fabulousness is not on my agenda. What passes as snappy dressing in my world may not work for a lot of people, but if I think I am a sharp dresser, considering a lifestyle that involves a lot of dog-walking, grandchild talking, student entertaining and basement sewing, then I am, to me, in this life, snappy. Maybe even, on good days, nifty too.

I'm holding the line on this one.

More to the point I try to share as much as I can in this blog that I figure might be useful to someone who is working on their own snappy dressing, in their own place.

So if I see a pattern and wonder, it looks good on that model, but what would it look like on a person like me? and I find out, then that's what I share.

If the sight of me, front, back and sides in my clown pants inspired you to never make striped pants ever in this lifetime then I have personally saved you a yard and a half of 60" fabric.

That's all to the good.

Now onto patterns.

I am on high alert on patterns at the moment. We have a big wedding of my NYC son and the nice girlfriend I told you about, in September. I am making four flower girl dresses, probably a couple of dresses or outfits for me (unless I see something to buy that will save me the trouble), at least one dress for my daughter, and probably the same for my other son's girlfriend.

I have been thinking a lot too lately about comfort and wearable clothes. And much to my surprise, and taking into account that I am the last person in North America not to watch the West Wing, I am catching up on Netflix and enjoying seeing just how wearable that recent era's clothes were.

I look at this and I think you can move in something with that ease:

And I look at this below, and wonder if any blogger in ten years will be saying that outfit made the best of a woman who wanted to be at ease and elegant. 

And I'm not wearing anything like this to any wedding I can tell you. 

What must the model be thinking when she put this on (apart from they don't pay me half enough?):

And the new Vogues I have been holding my breath over have failed to inspire too.

This is what I mean.

The best of the bunch IMO but let's face it, that is some serious sewing in those seams but if you achieve it you better damned well hope there are a lot of sewers in the room who get it - otherwise everyone else is just going to think you've just got a plain dress on.  Also anyone want to write a tutorial on how to do a FBA on that one? Pardon me while I lie down in a dark room with a cool cloth on my head.

Ricci is alway interesting but do you see where that slit is ending? Now picture it in the body that was inside the clown pants. Now picture it in that body in that skirt sitting down on some sofa making small talk. And what's with the drawstring dangling on the sides? Like you forgot to tie the bow. Can't be for drawing, that skirt's tight enough.

This is the outfit you wear if you are the kid who didn't turn out that good. At least it shows what to wear with these shoes which are the kind of shoes you see in the store and wonder what you would wear with them. Well now you know.

I liked the shape of this coat and wondered if I should go all wearable art until I saw this back neck view. I believe this is why I put in neck darts. You sew this and you are going to spend your whole life moving your neck around and pulling at it towards the front and trying to get it adjusted.

Sandra Betzina is a very nice person but sometimes I wonder. This is exactly the kind of dresses my sisters and I made when we were working with sheets and safety pins. No one in the world is going to put this on and look in the bathroom mirror and say "damn I look good."

I guess when you are trying to do something different with a plain shirt you might think of this. Reminds me of the many sleeves I have inserted on the wrong armhole, but didn't leave them like that.

OK. You know those little pictures Vogue has at the side that tell you what body shape this would look good on? Well for this one I expected those squares to be blank.

This is exactly the kind of top you make and you go out in and go home at lunch and change because you don't know what you were thinking. You start out saying you are edgy and then you remember you are actually a person who used to order out of the Avon catalogue. You just want to go home.

The model is thinking - I wasted all that fabric. She would be better off with clown pants and I mean it.

Have you checked out Pinterest for mother of the groom outfits? More like let's bury mom in this outfits. This one deserves pinning to that board. I thought the ensemble below was dumpy but that was before I saw the dress. And not all shades of green look good in shiny.

At first I thought this was interesting and might be a challenge to sew and then it reminded me for some reason of paper plates. And once you have started to think something looks like paper plates you can't stop. Trust me.

Now what am I going to wear to that wedding?