In which I might start buying fabric and sewing it into clothing! Or… or not.

My clothes suck. They’re old, or weird and out of context, or cheesy because I bought them from Walmart. Add to this the fact that my body stopped being 25 fifteen years ago and is now oddly shaped, and the whole clothing thing is practically a crisis.

While I do know how to sew, I never really enjoyed it and I haven’t done very much of it. I used to prefer store-bought clothes because handmade clothes struck me (when I was a a kid) as being dowdy and poor-looking, and I’ve always been secretly stuck-up in my own dirty, messy way.

Recently, though, I realized that my favorite items of clothing are not just dresses: they’re unique, one-of-a-kind handmade dresses. All of them.

The last thing I made was a bridesmaid’s dress for a marriage that is already defunct. It–the dress, not the marriage–was an eggplant purple six-panel floor length gown with spaghetti straps and diaphanous off-the-shoulder butterfly sleeves.

I snipped the sleeves off and I still wear the dress sometimes, under a t-shirt, as a skirt. The bride’s mother had promised to do all the hems and didn’t have time to finish before the ceremony, so my hem was tacked up with iron-on facing on the floor in the chapel and I barely had it back on my body before I had to find my place for the processional. The polyester lining in the bodice was once tacked down by hand but has since broken loose and floats around in there with my girls and is generally very plastic and very irritating. I should throw the damned thing out, but it’s EGGPLANT PURPLE and FLOOR LENGTH and has a REALLY KILLER SPIN and I MADE IT. I think I once intended to fix the hem and chop off the bodice and turn it into a proper skirt, but that’s never happened.

Anyway! Last week I spent four entire hours surfing for handmade clothing on Etsy (where I bought a dress, a hoodie, and two demi hoodies) and as I looked through hundreds of hand-made knit items of clothing I kept thinking, “Well, that’s super cute! But pretty expensive. But cute! Hmm. It totally wouldn’t be that hard to make… if a person owned a serger. Which I don’t. But I do know how to make a French seam…”

Since then I’ve been thinking about designing myself some custom clothes. I’d have to buy fabric and set up the machine aunt Sue left at the house last fall when she upgraded her own machine, and cut things out and pin them together and actually sew them up… but I could probably manage to do that, for a cute dress or top or pair of leggings or three.

I’ve discovered that cheap sergers can be had online for about $150. Seriously, I almost bought one last week – even though I haven’t sewn a single stitch in at least a decade – but I decided I’d have to actually produce and wear several items the hard way before buying myself a piece of equipment.

Most of my ideas involve knits. I’m a knitter, and knit is really comfortable to wear and live in. (Am I the only one who’s noticed that the 40-somethings are the ones wearing all the ugly knit track and lounge clothes? It must have something to do with the way your body feels when you’re this age – you suddenly can’t stand things that bind, so you buy what’s comfortable… and sadly what’s comfortable is fugly knit separates from Walmart. I definitely like to be comfortable, it’s just that I don’t want to be caught dead in a fucking knit pantsuit.)

I really adore a lot of the stuff I’ve seen here, here, and here and I have a lot of ideas for clothes along similar lines. (Actually, if I were being honest I wouldn’t call them ‘ideas’ so much as the ‘blatant theft of designs I’ve seen on Etsy.’) Several of the items I’d like to add to my wardrobe are just too expensive to buy (like this $400 dress and wrap combo I’m totally lusting over – OMG I would wear the holy living shit out of that little number). I understand the pricing completely – when you factor in your labor and your materials and your design time, that’s just how much it costs to produce a handmade item – but I’m just not spending two hundred bucks on a knit dress no matter how incredibly adorable it is.

With both avarice and poverty spurring me on, it occurs to me that I could easily take my favorite knit shirt, draw a pattern from it, add a 4-panel floor length skirt and a loose cowl, and turn it into a reasonable facsimile of the dress I’m in love with. And if that works out, I could probably come up with some kind of cute wrap for texture and pockets and to slightly disguise my pudge. And from there it shouldn’t be too hard to make a couple of pairs of pants and a few tops and some fun layering items.

I could do it for far less than I could buy it for on Etsy and I’ll never find a similar item in a store, not ever. And, most importantly, it would keep me from buying any more awful knitwear from fucking Walmart because I have no clothes that aren’t old, weird and out of context, or cheesy.

Meanwhile, I haven’t done any knitting in months and the only cooking I do is to fill my lunch box. So yeah, I could totally use a new hobby, yeah.