A closet tinkering experiment

Like last week's, this post is about clothing that doesn't quite fit. But while that one was about a garment I've been afraid to try altering because I didn't want to mess it up, this is about one that I decided to go ahead and mess with because I pretty much had nothing to lose.

The piece in question is a simple white blouse that I bought many years ago from, if I recall correctly the Newport News catalog. While many of the garments I bought years ago have grown too tight for me, this one has gone in the opposite direction. Its stretch cotton fabric has gradually lost its resilience, leaving it too loose all around. This is mainly a problem because the over-large shirt no longer stays tucked in neatly, so whenever I wear it as part of my Morris dance costume, it pulls itself loose as I dance, even with a snugly cinched belt over it. And even when I'm only wearing it about my everyday activities, the shirt keeps pulling free each time I sit, stand, or otherwise move around, and I have to keep tucking it back in.

Taking the shirt to a tailor obviously wouldn't be worthwhile. It cost less than $20 when it was new, and now it's decades old, worn thin and with yellowish stains about the armpits. Having it altered would definitely cost far more than the shirt is now worth. And yet, at the same time, it's still a wearable and pretty nice shirt. True, I own a couple of other white shirts I can wear for Morris dancing, but this one is warmer, so it's useful for gigs in cold weather, as well as for wearing under a sweater in the wintertime. It seems like a shame to just throw it out, even assuming I could find a new one that's just as good.

Taking all these facts into consideration, I decided, well, I really have nothing to lose by tinkering with it myself. It's not much use to me as it is, so I'm not running the risk of spoiling a useful garment; the worst that can happen is that I'll have to discard it and buy a new one, which is probably what I'll have to do anyway if I don't mess with it.

So I got out some safety pins and started experimenting. I found that by pinning it in several places across the back, I could get it back to a reasonably snug fit - still comfortable, but tight enough to wear and keep it tucked in. However, I quickly discovered that wearing it with the pins in place all the time wasn't really a solution, as a sudden movement could cause the well-worn fabric to tear around them. I'd need to stitch it up somehow.

Rather than simply stitch the two sides together, I decided to try a technique I'd seen while dabbling with DIY Renaissance garb: adding holes and connecting the two sides with laces. This would make the shirt adjustable, so I could make it tighter or looser as needed to accommodate any future fluctuations in weight, as well as giving it a cool, vaguely Renaissance vibe.

So I dug through my scrap bin for the longest piece of white ribbon I could find, then searched through my sewing box for a needle large enough to accommodate it. I tied a knot at one end to keep the ribbon from slipping all the way through and started poking holes in my shirt. I knew this would probably make the shirt unwearable if it didn't work, but again, since it was pretty close to unwearable anyway, I didn't have much to lose. It took a bit of repeated jabbing and wiggling to get the needle all the way through the fabric, but I eventually managed to create a series of holes, crisscrossing from bottom right to middle left to top right and back over and down. Then I adjusted the ribbon until it was more or less even on both sides, tied it loosely in a bow, and tried the shirt on.

And it fit, sort of. That is, the shirt was snug enough in the waist to wear tucked into trousers without it coming loose. Under a sweater, in fact, it would look perfectly normal. But by itself, well...it looked a little weird. Basically, the upper part of the shirt was now much looser than the lower part, so there was all this excess fabric that bulged out on top like a big balloon. I don't think I'd really want to wear the shirt for Morris dancing in its present condition.

So, if this experiment wasn't really a success, why am I sharing it here? Because I think it's important to talk about the ecofrugal endeavors that don't work out, as well as those that do.

 The trend nowadays seems to be to curate the public version of our lives, as presented on social media, and show only the best bits - the parts that make us look more successful, more glamorous, more fun, more exciting than we really are. The problem is, seeing only the best parts of all our friends' and acquaintances lives makes us less satisfied with our own. So, for instance, if you're a regular reader of a blog about ecofrugality, and all the ecofrugal experiments you read about on that blog are incredibly successful, you might easily become frustrated that so many of your own attempts to save money and/or the earth don't work out very well. Perhaps you'd even conclude that you just aren't cut out to live an ecofrugal life, and you shouldn't bother trying anymore.

That's exactly the message I don't want to send. I want you to know about the things I do that don't work so that you can learn from my mistakes - but I also want to show how I keep plugging away at my attempts to live an ecofrugal life, even if I don't always succeed at it. I want to encourage you to try little money-saving experiments like this one, even if they might not work out, because trying things that don't work is an important part of learning what does. Maybe something that doesn't work the first time can work better on the second or third. (For instance, I'm already considering the possibility that this shirt might look better if I just continued the lacing farther up the back, and planning to keep an eye out for cheap white ribbon so I can give it a shot.) And even things that turn out not to work at all - like all the crops we've tried in our garden that we couldn't grow to save our lives - provide useful information about what not to do. Now that we know we're no good at growing Brussels sprouts, for instance, we can just set aside more space for green beans.

In the words of Samuel Beckett: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."