Morning flowers.
Last night's greenway, where we walked two miles before going home to bed.
We've been sleeping late, waking around 9. I guess we need the sleep? I have been getting into bed later than usual. Last night I put my book down at 11:30, an hour later than I usually go to sleep. My husband was up even later, talking I think to the Viking Son who came in from work around midnight.
Anyway, here we are. It's a cloudy day so far, though the sun is supposed to come out, and the high to be 85F. Really not bad at all. There are thunderstorms forecast for tonight and tomorrow, which I don't mind --- I've welcomed rainy days recently as respites from the heat, as well as water for the garden. And it's nice sometimes to have a day to stay inside . . . makes me look forward to the coziness of cold weather. That, of course, is a long way off, but I enjoy the little foretastes that the late summer offers.
Eating some scrambled eggs made by my husband and contemplating the day. I want to write another Sun essay and to continue my course-planning roll. Yesterday I spent some hours in a teacher-orientation Zoom meeting that I wasn't sure I needed to attend, but was ultimately glad that I did attend, because I learned some things about software I haven't used in years, as well as getting my mind focused on course planning and presentation. I updated my instructor log-in information, and hope to spend some time today working on my actual online course pages, as well as planning in the Google Doc I have going already.
And I'm thinking about more poems to send out, as a couple of journals where I've had good luck in the past have opened their submissions windows.
Meanwhile, let's play a little game: Does This Dress Look Good On Me?
I'll just confess right now that I have an answer in mind, but that this is a question that comes up a lot in groups where people are making decisions about clothes, and that there's a theme I have observed.
So . . .
Does This Dress Look Good On Me?
Answer: Not if I stand like this, it doesn't.
So often, people hate taking selfies --- which I can understand. You feel like a dork. You feel self-conscious. So in response to that feeling, you stand like a self-conscious dork, a person who wants more than anything else to be invisible. Shoulders self-protectively rounded and curved in. Spine curled down. Body doing its best to roll into a fetal position while standing up.
The result? When I do this, I look every bit as dumpy in the dress I'm wearing as I was afraid I would look. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm afraid I look bad. I'm afraid to have people look at me when I look bad. I go into Standing Fetal Position. And wah-lah. I was afraid my stomach would stick out, and it does. I was afraid my boobs were droopy, and they are. I was afraid my dress would show every imperfection, and it does --- because my posture has made sure that it would. Welcome to self-sabotage.
Now, I'm grateful for many things about my upbringing and education, but one thing I've been consistently grateful for, and have increasingly noticed as kind of unusual in contemporary society, is that at my girls' school in the 1970s, weekly ballet class was part of PE. I'm not a dancer at all, but more and more I've realized how much those lessons stuck. All that standing at the barre. All that alignment of the body. All that movement with the body aligned. I was honestly not very good at it, mind you. I was a relatively clumsy child. And yet, the habit got itself ingrained.
Horseback riding helped, too --- again, we were constantly being exhorted to draw an imaginary line from our ear to our heel, and to make sure our body stayed on that line. That habit, too, got ingrained. Even years of unconsciously slumping at the computer or bending my neck down to read something on my phone screen have not completely undone those early habits.
The result: I'm not a dancer, but I know how to stand. To a certain extent, I know how to move. I'd know better if I'd really trained as a dancer or an actress, but at least I have the baseline awareness of my body and its lines that years of even the most beginner-level dance inevitably teach.
Why am I going on about this?
I'm going on about it because, if we're asking how a dress looks on us, a lot of the answer, if not the whole answer, lies in how we hold our body while wearing that dress.
You can stand like this:
Or you can stand like this:
I've tried to make the old straight-line-from-ears-to-heels with my body. My body doesn't cooperate perfectly anymore, but I can consciously stand with an open, lifted torso, shoulders back but relaxed. Lifting my ribcage, thinking up and open about that space between my ribs and up across my sternum, automatically brings my not-flat stomach in some. My whole torso is more vertical and elongated, which gives the ol' menopause belly someplace to go, other than out. My spine is not as straight and even as it was when I was young, but still: I can elongate it consciously and practice standing and moving that way. And when I do, my clothes automatically hang more flatteringly.
There's this (I really kind of had to try to slouch):
Or there's this:
Same dress, one minute after the previous photo. I have not lost weight. I've just shifted my posture. Notice how the line of the dress falls differently. I haven't put on shapewear. I'm not thinner. But the whole look is smoother because I stood up straighter, and I paid attention to what my torso was doing.
Now . . . what I'm wearing today is a dress I've been dubious about. You can see why a lot of this model appeared on Poshmark at ridiculously marked-down prices: note those armholes. Good thing I have a Boody bamboo bralette in a pretty color, to pretend to be a camisole under my dress. I can feel confident that nothing is showing that should not be showing, which helps with the whole posture game, but even so, I just haven't been sure about this dress. I love the color. I actually love the cotton knit, though it doesn't handle sweat nearly as well as wool does. It's a soft, heavy, well-made, high-quality dress.
How flattering is it? Well, that's still an open question, but there's one thing I do know: it's a lot more flattering when I stand up straight, with confidence, as if I believed I looked pretty in it. It looks a lot better when I'm not trying to do the standing fetal position. It's downright fun --- if I pose like a woman having fun in her clothes:
I'm not an actress, any more than I'm a dancer, but as with dance, I've done enough theater in the course of my life that I can fake things. I'll never play Lady Macbeth, but I can play the role of an attractive woman who looks good in her clothes every day of my life that I choose to play that role. And why wouldn't I choose to play that role? Well . . . maybe some days I have trouble convincing myself. But it's a role that costs me nothing, beyond the price of the dress I put on, which costs exactly the same whether I wear it well or not. It doesn't involve shapewear. It doesn't involve a diet. It doesn't involve a lot of working out, though I do exercise daily.
It also doesn't involve being actually prettier than I am. What it does involve is believing that I'm pretty, that my clothes look good, that I don't need to hide in shame. That's literally all it costs me: that fundamental belief about myself, which I work every day to cultivate.
So I am wearing this dress today: the questionable Pact purple cotton sheath dress. I wore it once in July, and this might be its one August outing. Who knows? But it's a dress I have, so I try to make it a dress I wear --- assuming that I enjoy wearing it. On balance, I think I do, at least enough to keep it in the closet.
Accessorized with Birkenstocks and wet hair, which will dry as I walk the dog.
LATER: MORE DYE ADVENTURES
The Rit Sage Green dye arrived today, and my bamboo leggings of the other day are in their dye bath now. I'm a little dubious about how they'll turn out. Dried, they looked kind of brown, and I'm not convinced that the green is going to wind up being a very nice shade. BUT I also have some Evening Blue dye on the way (welcome to my new addiction, friends). I figured I might dye my linen big shirt, which is a very pale, almost white-blue. I like it, but I think I might wear it more year-round if it were a slightly darker, bluer shade. Anyway, I could save out some blue dye for the leggings, to correct any brownness if necessary. That dye also should get here sometime today, so we shall see what we shall see. I hope nobody else in the house wanted to do laundry anytime soon.
GREEN DYE UPDATE:
Here's how the leggings have turned out.
As always, it's hard to photograph colors accurately, but I'm outside, trying in clear sunlight. They're still damp, right out of the wash, drying on the fence. But as you can maybe see, I have achieved some greater greenness here. Or if you can't see it, trust me. They were a lot browner, a lot less green, last time around.
This is a lot more like what I was going for: a lighter green than the spruce Sierra dress, with the marbled pattern still visible. What I got with the Jacquard dye was a lot less green, a lot more taupe. Now what I have is maybe a slightly mossier green than I was hoping for, but it's not bad. I couldn't wear this next to my face, I don't think, but I could definitely wear it with my whole wardrobe of dresses. I could bother to make them bluer, but I don't know that I really need to. I'll hold them up to my dresses and see what I think, once they're dry. But this is a lot more in the neighborhood of what I was looking for. I think what I've been wanting is something kind of jade-colored . . . I might look for another green to overdye this one at some point, to achieve that effect: jade, but with some subtle veining which in real life I don't think is what jade looks like! But it can be what my leggings look like.
While I was waiting for all this to go through its cycle, I wrote a little essay on Keats's "When I Have Fears." Now that I'm finished with this round, at least for the time being, it's back to work.
WORK BREAK:
Another shot of the leggings in indoor light:
They're definitely looking olive green. Not bad, but not quite what I'm going for. Right now I'm running my linen shirt through a bath in Rit Evening Blue, which is a lovely calm gray-blue. I only needed about 4 ounces of liquid dye for the one 6-ounce shirt, so I'm going to use the rest for the leggings, once the shirt is done, to try to achieve something a little more like this shade. I kind of feel that we have the yellowy green and the gray covered, and that what we need is a dose of blue.
Ultimately, I'm looking for some soft, muted, but deeper shades here. I have vibrant all taken care of, as again this shot of my leggings-and-tights bin clearly demonstrates (you can also see how yellowy the marbled leggings originally were, which is maybe one subtle reason why they never made me entirely happy):
But I am looking for colors that would mix well with, for example, my wisteria Willow dress. More soft blues and greens really suggest themselves as good possibilities: soft, but not so pastel and light that they don't work in the depth of winter.
So, stay tuned. Today will probably be my last dye day for a while, but I'm keen to see what its outcomes are.
SHIRT OUTCOME:
It's gone from a really, really pale blue, almost white, to this lovely chambray shade. I like it a lot. Here it's been washed and is drying, though I might wash it again a few times just to be sure the dye isn't going to bleed. I love this soft, weathered blue, which I think will look really nice as an overlayer with my Audrey, for example. I've worn this shirt more with that dress than with just about anything else, and I think I'll enjoy the slightly lower contrast with the dark heathered dress fabric, as well as with other things. The shirt also looks slightly less summery this way, less like a day at the beach, and more like a year-round piece.
I also wear it with the dress I'm wearing today, as this photo reminds me. The light blue was nice, but I really think that this evening blue will be delicious with the purple.
Now the leggings are in their blue bath. I don't want to turn them blue, just to add blue to the green that they already are. We'll see how that turns out . . .
FINAL DYE UPDATE:
Okay, I think I have dyeing out of my system for awhile, but anyway.
Here are the leggings after a blue bath:
Here's a side-by-side comparison with their first dye experience today:
I think they look kind of nice with my dyed blue linen shirt:
Maybe I'll actually wear a shirt and leggings someday, who knows?
At any rate, I'm going to let them dry, and then I'll see how I like them in my palette of leggings and tights. If they still seem like an off note in the chord, I'll consider more dye options. I'll do something maybe a little more aggressively blue. But for now I think I'm done.