Dress Your Best: Hips are Love

Outfit:

• Brown heels: ???
• Brown trousers: maurices
• Draped Top: maurices
• Silver Belt: ???

Notes:

Ok, I know it’s a little late, but here’s my final Dress Your Best post.  Today, I decided to play up my hips.  As I said in my first Dress Your Best post, I actually like my hips.  With my weight issues, I’m more sensitive about my waist.  To me, my hips are a symbol of femininity, associated with general sexiness and somewhat with childbirth.  And I’m not ashamed to say that I have child-bearing hips.  However, my hips tend to get covered up in the attempts I make to hide my waist, so for Dress Your Best, I really wanted to let them have the spotlight for a little while.

There was a time that I collected belts that are meant to be worn on the hips, but again, like many things, they got shoved to the back of the closet when I gained weight.  Today I pulled one of them back out.  I wanted the belt to be the highlight of the outfit, so I kept the rest simple.  Surprisingly (well, to me), I got numerous compliments on the belt and how nice I looked.  This outfit is definitely a keeper, and it’s inspired me to go in search of my other hip belts.

Also, wanted to share the awesome trench-coat I got from my big shopping day a few weeks again.  I’ve been wanting a more rainy-day friendly coat, and I was lucky enough to find this one on sale.

Anyway, that’s the end of Dress Your Best week for me.  And I won’t be teaching until a few weeks from now, so this will probably be the last fashion post until then.  I’ll be picking up a lot of summer projects, so stay tuned for updates on those.

Dress Your Best: Ankles/Feet

Outfit:

• Shoes: No Doubt via Ebay
• Skirt: Self made (Pattern McCall’s M5430)
• Blue top: ???
• Wooden Heart Necklace: ???
• Pearl Ribbon Necklace: Freejewelry.com

Notes:

Ok, I have what I call “bendy ankles of doom.”  I say this because I’ll be walking along, minding my own business, and all of sudden one of them bends to the side and I lose my balance.  I never fall over, and I’m never hurt, but it sure is embarrassing.  Surprisingly, this doesn’t scare me away from high heels, even though the bendy ankle thing is more likely to happen.

I have tiny feet, and this makes shoe shopping awesome.  I always seem to find cute shoes in my size.  These heels are actually from the UK, and would you believe it, they’re 4 inches high.  Talk about a height boost.   My feet get a little stiff, but I have no problems in heels that high, because I have naturally high arches.

Thank goodness I was focusing on the heels so much, because after seeing this photo, I’m not sure I like the rest of this outfit.  In preparation for Dress Your Best Week, I started digging through my closet for things I may have forgotten to the depths of comfy clothes and familiar outfits.  Hence the skirt and top.  The skirt I sewed myself, to wear with some corsets for a steampunk festival.  It seemed rather plain without the corsets, and so it got relegated to the back of my closet.  I had plained to take some chocolate colored paint and paint a gear design on it; it was one of those many projects that got set aside.  Now, I’m not so sure it needs it.  I still think it would look cool though.  The shirt was a mistake, I think.  I thought something brightly colored would contrast the pile of neutrals I was wearing, but it really isn’t cut well, and I felt uncomfortable all day.

The great thing about fashion is you try different things and see what works and what doesn’t.  This top will go to the back of the closet for a while, I expect.

Dress Your Best: Curly Hair

Outfit:

• Flats: ???
• Gray Trousers: Maurices
• Blue Cami: Maurices
• Black Cardigan: Maurices
• Ribbon: ???

Notes:

So, as part of Dress Your Best week, I’ve started off with showing off my hair.  My hair is curly, as you can see.  Similar to many other people with curly hair, I used to hate my hair.  I didn’t know what to do with it.  Nobody else in my family had curly hair, no one knew where it came from.  Junior high and high school was difficult.  When I finally got to college, I started learning how to properly care for my hair.  I learned to wash it properly, style it properly, and it repaid me by showing it what it can do.

What My Hair Can Do:

• Hold heat styles with no hairspray (Straightening, Curling Irons)
• Grow insanely fast.
• Hold semi-permanent color for 6 months instead of 6 weeks.
• Withstand Great Plains winds and still stay spunky.

Now, some would say that I’ve broken a few cardinal rules about curly hair: mainly, that my hair is fairly short.  I had long hair for a long time, cropped it super short in high school, and wore it long again in undergrad.  I like this medium length here because it looks good straight or curly, it’s a nice length to manage, and it’s spunky.  And I’m all about the spunk.

To show off my curls for Dress Your Best week, I just decided to dress them up with a shiny blue ribbon.  Too often I want to pull my hair off of my face, to the detriment of my curls.  And actually, my hair is still wet in this photo, which is a different look than when it finally dries.  I meant to take a second picture, but finals week defeated me.  The ribbon was also a little short, and ended up falling out after a couple hours.

This calls for a Skirt!

Oufit:

• Flip flops: Walmart
• Green Skirt: Cross Cultures (hippie store)
• White Lace Tank: maurices
• Black Cardigan: maurices
• Necklace: Freejewelry.com

Notes:

Posting around here slowed down this week because of impending finals.  However, with no classes next week, and only one final homework assignment and one take-home final, I should have plenty of time to make posts next week.

In the latest installment of my fashion related photos, I’ve decided to show off what I call my sari skirt.  I have no idea if it’s actually made from a sari, but I think it’s pretty enough to have been one.  This is yet another find from my hippie store back home (which I have finally remembered the name of!).   That store is a treasure trove for unique things that are either cool or lovely.

This skirt is light (but surprisingly, not see through), and so I don’t get to wear it until the weather warms up a bit.  It’s a wrap skirt, so it’s one of the few things that truly is “one size fits all”.  Since it already has a color contrast from the orange band at the bottom, I’ve previously had a hard time forming outfits with it.  I’ve usually reached for a black tank top, but I feel like that darkens the outfit too much to really let the skirt shine.  Now that I have a white cami, I feel much better about this outfit.  However, white cami is pretty much see-through, not something that I can wear and hope my students won’t notice.  Hence the need for the black cardigan.

My hope is to sometime soon get a gray cardigan or a brown cardigan.  I think the brown would play off the orange at the bottom well (orange is not a color I often feature in my wardrobe.)  Or since there are gray tones in the green pattern of the skirt, the gray could keep the whole outfit looking light and springy like I originally wanted.

In fashion related news, one of my favorite blogs Academichic, is having an event called “Dress your Best” week.  When it comes to fashion, so many of us, including me, are interested in hiding all our flaws.  Our lumpy stomachs, our flabby thighs, untoned arms, or whatever other feature we decide to take offense with.  Dress your Best means instead of dressing your worst features and focusing on them, dress your best features, the things you like.  The conditions of the contest stipulate you pick five fave features, and then next week, you dress to show them off.  You can read more here.

I will be participating, and my five features are

1. Hair – My hair is curly and adorable.
2. Wrists – Despite my weight gain and other issues, I still have tiny hands and wrists.  It’s one of the few places where my weight gain doesn’t show.
3. Ankles – aka the bendy ankles of doom.  Like my wrists, these are my feet are still delicate looking, and my calve muscles aren’t too bad either.  Expect heels at some point.
4. Hips –  Surprisingly, I don’t mind my massive, womanly hips and actually love showing them off.  In the whole weight gain frenzy, I’m more scared of my waist, but I still have a slightly hourglass figure.  In hiding my waist, I’ve also tended to hide my hips.  No more!
5. Neckline – There’s a fancy French word for the collarbone and neck area.  In recent years this hasn’t been as much of a showstopping feature as it was when I had very prominent collarbones, but I can still rock showing it off.

So that’s the list.  Watch for a post next week featuring one of these lovely features (ha, a pun!), and there might be more than one.   What are your 5 favorite parts?  Leave a comment and try “Dress your Best” week out for yourself!