Something new from something old

One of my favourite pastimes is what I call ‘customising clothes’. This involves making my clothes fit better, or altering their style, or dyeing them, or all of those.

I find this much more satisfying than making new clothes from bought patterns because it’s more creative and means that I have what feel like new clothes, but are also familiar comfortable ones perfectly adjusted for me.

Here are some recent projects.

These orange trousers had become flimsy with washing and no longer worked as straights. I turned them into flares with some stiff pale-blue denim, and now I love them even more than before. They suit my flamboyant streak and I know Frog would love them too because they hark back to the hippie era of our teens.

I gave this t-shirt to Frog for Christmas but he only managed to wear it once. I’ve taken it in at the top and the sleeves, and now I wear it all the time. It assuages my grief.

I bought these two pairs of trousers shortly after Frog died, when browsing the internet for clothes was a way of staving off panic. One was in shades of pale blue and one was white and cream, none of the colours practical for dog-walking through mud. I therefore dyed the pale-blue pair ‘denim blue’ and the other bright pink. Subsequently I lost lots of weight and they hung off me. I took the waistbands off, made darts in the top and attached a new waistband.

Note the bi-colour waistband here, which is partly a homage to the trousers’ original design and partly because I couldn’t decide between stretchy and non-stretchy denim so used a bit of both.

The (wonky) darts in the back

The bi-colour theme is still visible after dyeing, especially in the blue pair

They both still hang off me but at least they stay up, and the wide waistbands come all the way up to my waist unlike the old ones which cut me off mid-stomach. I find that much more comfortable and do that to most of my trousers (including the orange ones above, as you might have noticed).

I’m now wondering what to tinker with next, and also how to conclude this post. Perhaps there’s a metaphysical connection. Perhaps I’m making something new from the old life Frog and I had together. (And that's as far as I can go for the moment.)