Every time I worry that we are, in fact, in the end times (trying to remember if those wackaloons have bred their red heifer yet, and then beginning, ridiculously, to wonder what exactly would be the best thing to wear to the Apocalypse — certainly it would need a lot of pockets, and of course if you are facing the Apocalypse surely you wouldn't care about eventual lung cancer, but could use asbestos cloth … and would red be too matchy-matchy?) I remember that, even if we are rapidly approaching the time of Peak Everything; there are consolations; even if the world is running down, we can make the best of what's still around.

Like, for instance, the Internets. Which lets me, with the click of several buttons, browse through an exhibit from the Met back in 2002 — Blithe Spirit: The Windsor Set, and see the dresses of another time when some had it that there was no use planning for the next year, much less the next decade; a time when they were going to party like it's 1939.

It always surprises me that mere electrons can manage to carry such treasures to me through wires and waves; treasures nearly as ephemeral as those electrons. How improbable, how ridiculous! What petite main in Vionnet's studio would believe it, if she were told that some American woman would, seventy years in the future, look at this dress–basically over the telephone? She'd stick you with a pin, and tell you to stop wasting her time. The woman for whom this dress was made would snort — she'd believe that in a year, maybe two, her dress would be hopelessly out of style, and not worth anyone's attention.

This dress is black silk satin and black silk net, with sequins. (A dress made of wet toilet paper would probably be less fragile.) And yet — it's still here. Its maker is gone; its wearer is gone; every man who guided it through a foxtrot, long gone: but it's still here. Still here, and since it's in a museum, safe and protected from everything from excess humidity to violent video games, likely to continue to be here, and through various generosities and some very clever engineering, we can up our brass periscopes outside our daily concerns and just, for a moment, look at it.

It might be taken (black birds, so ill-omened!) as a memento mori, but it might also be taken as kind of defiant monument: if something so delicate could abide through such terrible history, why shouldn't we? I'd like to call this a reverse Ozymandias; no "look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" but instead, a quiet invitation to rejoice.

I know this isn't a dress, but regular readers will know of my preoccupation — really, obsession — with short-sleeved cardigan sweaters. I *love* them. There is no better A/C-fighter/shoulder-coverup in the summer than a short-sleeved cardigan. A cardigan, a nice tee, and a pretty skirt is perfect for nearly any occasion … but it's been so hard to find decent short-sleeved cardigans! (Searches tend to turn up these horrors.)

And now, in answer to unarticulated prayers, it seems that J. Crew — yes, that J. Crew — has them. In TWELVE colors, including orange, kelly green, and TWO different yellows.

They're not cheap, unfortunately ($65) but they're not insanely unreasonable, and I've been satisfied with J. Crew quality in the past. But here's the most important part: I called to get the neck-hem measurement, and it's 21.5 inches in the medium. Yep — if you're shortwaisted, as I am, that should hit you perfectly at the top of the hip, which is where sweaters should fall. (Honestly. They've done all sorts of calculations, and invoked the golden ratio, and everything. That's where they should be.)

Sadly, about half the colors (including the green, the orange, and one of the yellows) won't ship until 6/16. (I really want ALL OF THEM, but I'm going to limit myself to one or two and see how they work out. I'm even tempted by the bright purple, and I hate purple.)

Now if I could only find mesh polo shirts that measured 21 inches or less, shoulder to hem, in nice colors, WITHOUT some big honking logo, my (sartorial) life would be nearly perfect.

Lisa sent this to me from her store, telling me it made her think of Bozo. Which is a reaction I completely understand, but don't share — this dress makes me think of a particular kind of woman who is all ruffles and sweetness on the outside, but inside is made of pure Kevlar, reinforced with carbon steel.

You know the type, I'm sure — they're a staple of soaps both day- and night-time — pretty, frail, completely ruthless. They (or their costume designers) like pastels, ruffles, bows, matching bags and shoes … and, occasionally, for a change of pace, red negligeés. The storylines write themselves.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that you can't look pretty and have power. Quite the opposite. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't use looking pretty to pretend you DON'T have power … while wielding the equivalent of a ten-megaton bomb. If you can make or break multinational corporations and destabilize smaller republics while trying on marabou slides in the shoe lounge at Saks, fine. Just don't put on a "little ol' me? I don't have two brain cells to rub together!" act while doing it.

I see less and less of the "little ol' me?" act these days, and that's encouraging. Because it's only by acknowledging that, yes, in fact, you DO have power, that you can accomplish things directly, that you can say "Do this because I said so," that the game will change so that direct power, wielded by women, becomes an everyday occurrence. When people ask "How did she make that happen?" and are interested in the actual work, and not any purported relationships of the woman in question, the world will be safe for ruffles as ruffles, and not as camouflage netting over machine-gun emplacements.

And, as someone who likes both ruffles *and* running the show, and makes no secret of either, I'm hoping that day comes sooner, rather than later.

Are these, or are they not, insufferably adorable? Seriously, these are the cutest things I've seen since my son was two.

And I know, I know, I've sworn undying devotion to the shoes of Jack Purcell, but a girl can LOOK, can't she?

I think it's the extremely low vamp, which I think always looks feminine and dainty. (YES, no matter HOW big your feet are. Seriously.) In fact, this reminds me of a holy-grail pair of shoes: the very-low-vamp saddle shoe. There was a girl in my junior high who had a pair, and damned if I can remember her name, what she looked like, whether she was even in any of my classes … but I remember the low-cut two-tone saddle shoes she had. In detail. It was a sad, sad day when I finally figured out where she got them (Thom McAn! Back when they had standalone stores!) and got my folks to take me to the mall … only to find they were sold out of my size.

Anyway, nostalgic digression aside, these are some darn cute sneakers. (Click on the image if your first reaction is OMG MUST HAVE NOW.) And if you were one of the folks who emailed me last summer about what sneakers go well with skirts? Here's the answer. (But, purist that I am … I'd put laces in 'em.)

I spent a few hours yesterday moving the winter clothes OUT and the summer clothes IN. This involves a great deal of dusting, both mental and physical. (For instance, why did I let another year pass without wearing my turquoise shantung hostess coat?)

Every time I make this switch I *vow* that I will finally pare down my closet to essentials. Just a few well-chosen pieces, blah blah blah. The truth is that I am not a "few well-chosen pieces" kinda gal. I am the kind of gal that has fifty cotton summer dresses and wears a different one every day, if she can.

However, I *am* getting rid of a few things, such as this brown-and-gold wool crepe wiggle dress. I made it several years ago (maybe even five or six?) and wore it, I dunno, once. I was having a wiggle-dress moment, back then; I don't know why. (Perhaps it was the joy of no longer looking mildly pregnant?) Anyway, I spent a lot of time on it and figured I should now set it free to live a full life with someone who will love it the way it ought to be loved.

Here's a closer view of the bodice:

The points on the tabs are a little lumpy, I have to say. Luckily the buttons are so nice (vintage!) that it draws the eye away.

This dress measures B 36-38, W 32, H 46, and the skirt is 28 inches waistline to hem. From the front neckline to the waist is 13.5 inches; from the back neckline to the waist is 14 inches.

So here's the plan: I'm going to put it up on eBay, at a very very low starting bid. If it sells for that, fine. But if it sells for anything upwards of $25, anything over that will go to charity — I'm thinking helping victims of rape in the Congo. How does that sound?

Here's the link: Brown Crepe Wiggle Dress.

Carol, a little while back, sent me THREE BOXES of patterns. Just because. (I know, am I lucky, or what?)

The boxes were FULL of treasures, but this one in particular caught my eye, even though I'm not a huge devotee of this era. But look at those gathers, and the sweet curve of the neckline!

So the plan is to go ahead and make the bodice, slap it onto a plain circle skirt, and see what happens. I'll have to change the waistline gathers to small darts (I don't like blousiness at my waist), and there will be some fiddling involved with the sizing (this is a B32; I … am not). However, I figure that the 1940s propensity for shoulderpads will work in my favor; by leaving them out I will get more room through the shoulder seam and the gathers should help with fullness over the bust. (And I have the "make the waist bigger" alteration down pat.)

I'm sure La BellaDonna could tell me why I want to put a circle skirt on this one — I think this straight-skirt cut is probably fine for those shaped like Rulers and Vs, but I need more sweep in the skirt to balance out what I insist is an Hourglass (but may in fact be a Pear — or perhaps just an Hourglass that needs to be flipped over?)

The only thing I can't decide is what fabric to use. I was thinking "huge floral!" (because I always think "huge floral!") but this might also be adorable in, say, gingham. Or seersucker. Or even eyelet. Ideas?

Oh, if you want to see the back of the pattern, it's here.

The Liberty fabric above costs roughly $45/yard, slightly less if you're a lucky eBay bidder (click on the image if you feel lucky, punk). And though I often recommend that if you possibly can, you should sew with Liberty prints, many people tell me that they couldn't possibly cut into such expensive fabric — even people who have been sewing for many more years than I have, even people who have made tailored jackets, for pete's sake. They're too afraid they'll screw it up.

So I was wondering about this, and decided (very uncharacteristically for me) to do the math. So let's say you buy fabric for four Liberty-print dresses: that's ($45*4 yds)*4, which would be $720.00.

And let's say that you ruin, beyond hope of recovery, ALL FOUR of your Liberty-print projects. That's a lot of money wasted, right? That's a month's rent for some people. Two or three car payments, maybe. Months of groceries, depending on how many teenage boys are in your household.

It's also 5.76 $125 dresses bought at a department store. (I'm taking $125 NOT as the median department-store dress price, but because it's the absolute maximum price I think I could bring myself to pay for a new dress off the rack.) Have you bought more than 6 dresses in your life that you didn't like? That you wore once, maybe? That hung in your closet until you pushed them into the forgiving arms of the Salvation Army? (Replace "$125 dress" with "$45 sweater" and "6" with "more than I want to recall" and you have MY experience.) What did you learn from buying those dresses? A lot less than you would have learned from trying to sew them, I wager.

Here I'm assuming (highly unlikely) that you would be unable to salvage anything that you had sewn … but I'm also assuming (highly likely) that you would learn a GREAT DEAL from four sewing projects, even if they were all sobbing failures. So much so that with the *next* project, you would most likely make something wearable.

That's just what failure is, or what it ought to be: failure is just figuring stuff out the hard way.

Almost every Saturday morning my little boy and I go roller-skating together. And every Saturday I tell my son (who HATES to fall down) that if he doesn't fall down, he won't learn anything. If you don't fall, you won't ever know how fast is too fast, how tight is too tight to take a turn, how soon (after a mega-blast blue-raspberry Slurpee) is too soon to head back to the floor. And if you don't screw up something — anything — in your life, you won't ever know how good you could have been.

So I *hate* it when someone tells me they don't want to try something because they might screw it up. So what? Unless what you're trying to do involves tightrope walking 5000 feet up, you probably won't DIE. And short of death, almost everything is fixable. Don't ask me for advice if that's not what you want to hear, because I'm the person who is going to tell you to take the new job, to ask the guy (or girl) out already, to move to the new city, to wear orange. I'll tell you to stop focusing on what you might lose, and start thinking about what you might LEARN.

Sometimes when people say they're afraid of failure, what they really mean is that they are afraid of humiliation. Which is completely understandable. But, speaking as someone who has felt humiliated more times than she'd like to remember, humiliation passes. (It passes like a kidney stone passes, but that's another story.) Not to mention that humiliation passes differently for each person: you remember it for months; the witnesses remember it for seconds (they have their own humiliations to obsess over, and don't have time for yours). You wake up the next morning, same as always. You head back into work, you run into that guy again ("Uh, hi!"), you get a new haircut to fix the one that wasn't such a good idea, after all. But at least you tried, and now you know something you didn't know before.

Or … you try, and it works! It works beyond your wildest dreams. (Insert wildest dreams here.) Even if it works a little bit short of your wildest dreams, that's still further along than you were yesterday. And there's no rule that you can't try again.

So, that thing? That thing you've been scared to try, because you think there's NO POSSIBLE WAY you could do it? That everyone would point and laugh when you fell? Today looks like an EXCELLENT day to give it a shot. Take it from me. (Everyone's looking the other way, anyway.) Go for it!

And if you're going to do it, you might as well wear something orange while you do. (I'm just saying.)