The Wrong Sleeve

Not long ago I went with friends to this boutique sale where various boutique shops gathered their wares in one location—a way to garner more buzz and get a wider spectrum of customers. These were not stores that I generally patronized, and while I thought some of the items there were cute, I just couldn’t get that excited about anything. I couldn’t get excited about a fancy T-shirt on sale for $50 or a cotton dress for $125; my practical side won out and there was nothing there that I couldn’t live without. But recently I went to Goodwill and bought a dress for $8 that I could get excited about.

I stumbled upon a cute pleated dress from Japan while at Goodwill and tried it on with great anticipation. I loved the little tie around the neck that added a sense of femininity and of course you can’t go wrong with a black dress. Yet, once I tried it on I had somewhat mixed feelings about it; the length of the dress was a bit longer than I usually wear, but I figured with a pair of heels it would look fine. And I wouldn’t wear the dress without a belt—that was a necessity. Wearing heels and a belt was an easy thing to do, but my main problem was the sleeves.

[Sigh.] Those sleeves were too long that made the entire dress look dated. It looked like something from twenty years ago…a dowdy school marm’s dress. I loved everything else about the dress except those dumb sleeves. So I thought how can I fix this? I thought about altering them, hemming them to be a few inches shorter but I was reluctant to do so. My sewing skills aren’t that awesome, and I thought the material might be a bit hard to work with and didn’t want to do something that I couldn’t undo. So I tried rolling the sleeves up, like how you might roll up the sleeves of a button down shirt, and I thought it looked cute. So I bought the dress.

Once home, I rolled up the sleeves and hand sewed them in place. It was a simple fix to do and I think improved the entire dress. It’s a pretty buttoned up conservative dress, so it needs to show a little skin…a little exciting arm skin action. I’m quite satisfied with this black dress—I’m happy with the style of the dress as well as the price.