Looking good on the cheap

I'm so excited about my outfit today. It looks good and it was reasonably priced. Half of my outfit came from the thrift store. And it was nice enough to wear to a weekend shift at work -- reporting outside for some Earth Day events on a beautiful spring day. :) Sorry the belt was a little crooked in the pic.

Outfit: Cardigan - H&M, Top - Thrifted for $1.50, Skirt - Thrifted and Rehabbed for $4, Belt - from another skirt, sunglasses - vintage from Mom's junk drawer, flats (not pictured) Toms, a Christmas gift.

My inspiration came from a couple places. First, I've kind of had a polka dot addiction. I stumbled upon this skirt from Modcloth. Love it. But then again, I've been spending way, way too much money on that website lately. So it was a sacrifice I had to make.

Luckily, while Mark and I were in Pittsburgh last weekend, we did some thrifting at our favorite shops. Found a maxi dress with similar polka dots. There was a huge hole on the bottom, but knew it had potential. Just snipped off the excess fabric and hemmed it in about 15 minutes. The result is what you see above. :)

I think I got the motivation through a few blogs I've been paging through: Refashionista and Fashionplate Cheapskate. Both very cool girls that look good on the cheap. Refashionista does rehab projects with thrift store finds, and the latter simply pairs awesome pieces together at reasonable prices. Need to be taking notes instead of dropping a zillion dollars I don't really have on clothes.

OK. That's all I got for now. Going to enjoy my one day off tomorrow. The life of a reporter. Ugh.

Look guys, I'm wearing a dress!

Dresses: I love buying them. I feel as though I can never have enough. Unfortunately, as my fiance Mark has repeatedly pointed out to me, don't I have enough of those? The thing is... I don't wear them hardly enough. Why?

I'm not really sure. I think there are many reasons. In the past, I've bought clothes on impulse, not thinking of occasions where I could where things, or what to pair them with. Now it's even tougher finding clothes that are work appropriate, since I pretty much live at work. Woof.

So, I found an awesome, versatile dress at TJ Maxx over the weekend that I loved. Hooray! Despite some problems, I was going to wear this thing, dammit. (and I did wear it to work today!)

Sorry, I have a bad habit of making a goofy face in every photo that's taken of me. 

So the near crisis: I found the LAST dress at the store, which happened to be in my size. I couldn't zip the awkward side zipper in the dressing room, but figured I could buy it and and have Mark help me with it when I got home. After 20 plus minutes of struggling back at the apartment, nope. That sucker would not budge. It wasn't that I was too big for the dress, but the zipper was malfunctioning. So I dusted off my sewing machine (quite literally, it had been in storage at my parents' for awhile) and decided on a complete impulse that I was going to give this awesome dress a functioning zipper. After watching a few video tutes, I used a quilting needle as a seam ripper to take out the existing zipper (NEVER AGAIN) and pinned/sewed in the new one.

The end result isn't perfect or even beautiful by any means, but it works, and that's all I really care about.

I'm just glad it all worked out and I was able to wear it. I think I was particularly inspired to try out dresses again after reading over some frock-friendly style blogs over the weekend... like this one and this one!

I mean, HOW CUTE are these buttons?

Hopefully, I'll be able to bring some of the other dresses I have into rotation. Here's to having more varied style beyond scarves, all black and polka dots! (More on that later. At least I eliminated two out of three of my over played style habits on this outfit.)

Dress: TJ Maxx, Tights: Modcloth, Brown Leather Shoes: Thrifted