jessicalprice:

So a little while back, I reblogged a post about tailoring your own clothes. The gist of it was this (IIRC):

Someone was wondering why even people on TV with non-mainstream-TV-approved body shapes always look so good in their clothes. 

The long and short of it is: their bodies aren’t better than yours. They just have people tailoring every single piece of clothing they wear to flatter their figures. 

Off-the-rack clothes aren’t made to look good on most people’s bodies. The advice in the post was buy clothes that fit the largest part of you, even if they’re too big elsewhere, and have them altered to fit. 

That post hit me like a lightning bolt. I have a curvy figure. I’m not plus-sized, but I’ve got a small waist and large hips. Which is great in certain types of clothes (dresses, mainly), but means that if I don’t wear fitted t-shirts or blouses–if they fall straight–I just look sort of… boxy. I need clothes that go in at the waist. 

My grandma was an amazing seamstress, so when I needed clothes fixed, she was around to tailor them. When she got into her 90s and her eyesight was too diminished for her to sew, we started going to a woman in our neighborhood who’d lost her husband and had started doing alterations to bring in some extra income. OF COURSE I looked good back then. I had a tailor.

Then I moved away from my parents without really knowing How To Adult and would go to Target to get clothes and just get depressed by them and never realized how much of an advantage having people who could tailor my clothes (and, you know, parents to pay for having them tailored…) had been. 

So. I have a 1970s Singer Fashion Mate sewing machine that is designed to weather the apocalypse–I got it at Goodwill for $20. 

And I have begun researching how to tailor your own clothes. If anyone else was wondering about that after that last post, here are some helpful links I’ve discovered. 

When and Why to Get it Tailored – This article is (annoyingly) set up as a slideshow, and focuses on getting a professional to do your alterations rather than doing them yourself, but it’s got some good advice nonetheless, such as:

• Basic alterations that can make a huge difference, such as adding lingerie loops to keep bra straps in place (SERIOUSLY MY FAVORITE DRESSES FROM HIGH SCHOOL ALL HAD THESE AND WHY DID THEY DISAPPEAR IN EVERYTHING I WEAR NOW?), adding snaps between the buttons on button-down shirts for larger-busted women (you know how sometimes they gap? there’s help for that), etc.
• Average prices (at least on the East Coast) for basic alterations: replacing a zipper will run you about $20, while tailoring pants or a skirt to fit your hips and butt will be about $35.
• If you want to get a garment made of special materials (leather, fur, beaded/embroidered silk) altered, go to someone who specializes in working with that material.
• What NOT to try to alter.
• How to find a tailor.
• Having that perfect dress that you love so much duplicated and how much that will cost.

Learning Alterations – Great step-by-step tutorials on basic alterations like how to take in the waist of jeans (essential if you have a smaller waist and larger hips, because it’ll stop them from riding down every time you bend over or sit down).

Tailoring Ready-to-Wear – A full-on online course from Craftsy (costs $24.99) with videos and individual lessons on everything from hemming pants to lengthening them to altering shoulders and armholes to adding hidden zippers.

Plus-Sized Fitting and Design – Another online course (this one’s $34.99) that looks like it focuses both on alterations and on actually making clothes that are flattering to plus-sized forms.

Alterations and Tailoring 101 – Not a how-to post, but this one has a lot of useful information and ideas, such as identifying which garments to alter.

Alterations Needed blog – A whole blog on this stuff, with a lot of detailed how-tos. It focuses on fixing things to fit if you’re shorter than average/petite, but contains a lot of great advice for anyone (like an entry on why button-down shirts often bulge in back and how to fix it). 

Pinch and Pin your Shirt – Super-quick video tutorial (aimed at gentlemen), but useful for anyone who wears button-down shirts on how to fix a baggy shirt. 

If I find other helpful tutorials, I’ll add them. If you know of any, please let me know!

THIS! I want to learn how to do this for oh so many reasons. If only so I can fit pants to my weirdly proportioned body.

outofcontextdnd:

“I’m going to infuse the spirit of Christmas into Kelley’s gun.”

Yay, my first submission.

ehmeegee:

In the last few months I’ve been approached by two different producers working on two separate documentaries that focus on online harassment of individual creators, both of whom were seeking my input. And in both cases I hesitated, considerably, before agreeing to go forward and share my experiences through interviews. What I want to be clear about is that, for the most part, I have an unbelievably supportive online community that sends only love and appreciation, and in reality, perhaps twice I year I deal with a legitimate safety threat that involves the police. I do not want to be branded or otherwise known as “that Field Museum YouTube science girl who gets harassed online a lot,” because that simply isn’t the truth.

In the context of other YouTube creators and female or minority science communicators, I’m under the impression that a low threat rate such as mine is fairly astounding: I’m a lucky one. I don’t have people sending me offensive gifs on twitter every day, spamming my inbox with pornography, sending rape threats to my tumblr accounts and on my YouTube videos. From my experience talking with other creators, they don’t have it as nice. But it’s a horn I try to not toot too much, because, y’know, the more I proudly proclaim the integrity of this following, the more at risk I feel for opening the floodgates for people to swoop in and try to start breaking me down, widely publishing my personal information online, or waiting to confront me outside of my workplace. So agreeing to go public and share my largely positive experiences, in a way, feels like a gamble to invite more of that senseless and condescending action into my life.

But I’m doing it because it’s not about me. It really isn’t. It’s about the people, mostly women, who contact me every week about someone who has stalked them because of their presence online…even if it’s a small, almost nonexistent presence… like, someone saw them on a train platform, asked their name, looked them up on Facebook and now won’t stop sending them uncomfortable messages. My interviews are for those people who we have promised to commute with so they feel safer than when forced to walk home alone. For those people who message me because they had someone stalk them at work but their employers won’t take them seriously enough to ensure their safety. It’s because we’ve still got this mentality that, somehow, people who publish their work or life online have ‘asked for it’ because they attained some minor semblance of a digital audience, and that somehow equates ‘attention seeking’ to a misinformed and evolving idea that ‘this person is needy and therefore doesn’t deserve personal barriers.’ It perpetuates the idea that the threats need to come with the job description because of the position’s seemingly intangible rewards of popularity. Standing on that train platform, engaging with another person, you must have been seeking attention. It’s your fault for having a Facebook page, a YouTube presence, an easy-to-find twitter account.. and we’ll give you no resources to help resolve your sudden problem. 

As we enter 2016, it’s evident now more than ever that transparent digital presences are going to be a pivotal way in which companies and individuals engage with families and friend groups, growing audiences, and a wider public. And it’s about time that we reconsider the flippancy of how many employers and law enforcement offices approach these positions and situations. I’m going public about my experiences because I find it novel that my employers take my personal safety so seriously – but many other people in far less public situations can say the same. And I also want to let it be known that it is possible to have a public life online not wrought with harassment and negativity, but one that is supportive and relatively innocuous. I want to help redefine what it means to be a spokesperson, a representative, an activist, without those titles bearing as much unnecessary negative burden. 

So, this is all just to say, endlessly, thank you for being awesome people who uphold me and my mission to communicate scientific discoveries with a wide populous… and for not making me feel like I need to be harassed and threatened in the process. Many of my counterparts do, and are, and I want to help better the future for all of us.