The hole in my wardrobe

My wardrobe is all kinds of pathetic. Having three children in the space of four years does dreadful things to a body and to add insult to injury, said small children can do a pretty number on whatever clothing you do manage to squeeze into. With the exception of the items I’ve made this year, nearly everything else in my closet needs replaced. Stretched out, spit up on, smeared with spaghetti sauce hands… the list goes on. I’ve decided that I’m tired of looking like a schlump. Just because I have three small children, doesn’t mean I need to look like a hobo. Now that the baby is nearing his second birthday, I feel like we’re emerging from the worst of their destructive tendencies towards my clothing. This is when they start trashing their own clothes. (As long as I keep dressing them in $1 pillowcases from the thrift store, they can have at it and my blood pressure won’t spike.)

With the knowledge that my wardrobe needs a complete overhaul, I had to identify the most glaring deficiency, and that turned out to be tops. Inventory reveals:

A few t-shirts from my pre-pregnancy days. While I can physically wear these shirts, they’re only slightly less indecent than if I had gone out with nothing at all.
One sheer blouse that I bought purposely long to hide my post-partum belly right after Granota (baby #2) was born because I needed something for a Christmas event. I could probably salvage this one by shortening it, but I think I’ve decided that I don’t actually like this one enough to go to the trouble.
A blouse that I sewed back before I realized that I need to make a long torso adjustment on just about everything. It barely hits at my hips, so the slightest arm movement and whoop! I’m Britney Spears.
Four kind of/ok t-shirts that have to pretend they’re “nice” shirts.

Clearly, this is a problem. I have a few skirts and no real viable options to pair with them. I dug around in a sackful of fabric that I bought long, long ago and found a nice lightweight blue cotton with textured ovals. I used Butterick 4609 — just a nice, basic button-up shirt.

I’m awfully proud of how this one turned out. Since the fabric is semi-sheer, I really took my time. I enclosed all my seams, so it looks just as good on the inside as it does on the outside. Then, when all I had left to do was buttonholes and buttons, my sewing machine died. Yes, I know there is a way to do buttonholes by hand, but there was no way I was going to ruin my perfect shirt by trying out a technique I had never used before. I got my machine back a couple weeks ago and finally got the buttonholes in and just sewed on all the buttons (ten!) this weekend. Today I got to wear a decent-looking shirt! It’s a happy day.