"So, what did you do this weekend?"

"Made a dress."



Yup...this is the fabric I bought last Saturday, sewn up to an old-ish (it might be as much as 10 years old) McCall's pattern (8041). This is the third incarnation of the pattern - I also have one in a gauzy cream-colored fabric with pink flowers, and also a chambray version of the dress with machine embroidery on the cuffs and hem.

Actually the fabric for this one is a bit crisper than what's totally desirable - it's sort of a plisse fabric and does have a very crisp hand. Nice for ironing in the hems before I sewed them, but I hope it softens up a bit with successive washings. It's hard to tell in the photo, but it's sort of a magenta color, with bright green vines, orange (yes, orange, and yes, it goes with the magenta) flowers, and tiny paler-magenta butterflies. The color scheme reminds me a bit of some of the 1930s era feedsack fabrics, where the printers/designers combined colors that might not be combined so readily today.

This pattern is one of my favorite patterns, and yet, every time I pull one of the dresses out of the closet, I hesitate - is the style maybe a bit young for me? Am I mutton dressed as lamb when I wear it?

But, earlier this summer, there was a newspaper article on "non age-appropriate dressing" (which I initially assumed was going to be about 6 and 8 year old girls dressing like Britney or Paris). But it was about women - women older than I am - wearing skimpy, revealing clothes. The article writer credited "Desperate Housewives" and that sort of thing.

And I think, maybe, if women in their 40s and 50s are running around dressing like what I would consider to be hoochie-mamas, then I can (at 37) get away with dressing like one of Dante Gabriel Rosetti's younger sisters.

(Yes, I know the dress isn't really truly authentically Pre-Raphaelite, but I think it has that kind of quality to it. And I like the sort of loose floaty romantic things that women wore in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Or at least that they wore when they were wearing something...)

I like the dress because it's cool and lightweight - just what you need for a summer day when it's close to 100*. And there's no waistband, which also helps. (And does anyone else have, um, certain TIMES when having any kind of a tight waistband makes you feel ill? There have been times when I've had to nip into the ladies' and remove my stockings - not because of heat, but because the waistband's pressure was making me sicky. And no, I don't wear stockings a size too small or anything like that.)

And it's just a nice simple dress - a front and a back, sleeves, and then facings and a little tie in the back to cinch it up a little. Easy to make and easy to wear. Maybe as much as "Pre-Raphaelite" it's like the "wash dresses" that women in the 30s and 40s made for themselves and wore at home.

Granted, the folks on "What Not To Wear" probably wouldn't like it - they'd probably send me off to a slightly-more-respectable version of the hoochie-mama boutiques to get something less sacky (I look at that photo and cringe...in real life, I look less fat in the dress than I do in the photo. And my hands really aren't as gigantic as they look in the photo...for some reason, all the photos I have of myself, my hands look HUGE to me). Or something more up-to-date. You know, that show always bothered me a little, I couldn't put my finger on it, until I read a column in the Chicago Tribune (this was while I was on the train, so I don't remember the date or the author) where the author talked about this - her particular example being of a woman that they badgered into getting rid of her "holiday socks." Apparently this woman had a whole collection of funny socks that were decorated for different holidays, and she'd wear them, and the hosts of the show were horrified by that. And the columnwriter said she found that kind of sad - she said it was like this woman was having a little bit of her individuality taken away, that she was being made to be more like other people. (Disclaimer: I know people go on that show willingly; they're not dragged to it. But still.) The column writer said something along the lines of: if her family and co-workers thought the socks were goofy and rolled their eyes about them a little, still, where was the harm? The woman was not harming anyone with her silly socks, and if it brought her a little happiness, then there was nothing wrong with it. (And for that matter - IIRC, the woman in question worked in a nursing home - if it brought some of her patients happiness, then it's not merely a neutral, it's a positive good).

And I guess that's it, for me - telling someone to get rid of the little individual qualities because it doesn't fit in with what everyone else is doing, or it's not up-to-the-second hip - it just seems kind of pointless, kind of wanting to make everyone just like everyone else.