Fashion Fixes on the Fly: Rubber Bands, Safety Pins, and Nail Polish

Let's talk fashion disasters.

I'm not talking about something that would pop up on Go Fug Yourself or a Worst Dressed List. I'm talking "zipper busted, run in tights, walked out of the house without a belt on and now my pants are gradually falling off" disasters. You know, the kind of thing that always happens to me, and while I'm fretting about it, NO ONE ELSE HAS NOTICED.

And let's face it, I don't carry around a sewing kit in my bag. I just don't. I don't even have safety pins on a regular basis. (I should fix this.)

So, just for fun, here are a few of the fixes I've done with what I've had handy.

- The too-cold cardigan. This past weekend, I was walking around with a deep-V cardigan that left my chest really cold, and my mind was racing as to what I could use to hold it shut -- sticks? rubber bands? How about that pink balloon I found randomly on the street; could I let the air out of the balloon and use that to tie the top closed? (The balloon was dirty, so I didn't do it. BUT I THOUGHT ABOUT IT.) Later I found a safety pin at my boyfriend's and used that to pin it closed, but I was digging in my purse and found that I did have a badge-style pin AND a hair tie in there, both of which would have worked.

- The loose button. I have that lovely Brooklyn Industries trench coat, which has a loose button. Instead of pulling it off and resewing it, I dabbed some Russian Navy (I know, blasphemy, right?) nail polish on the thread in hopes of securing it a little better. I think I still need to resew it, though. But as a quick fix, nail polish (either colored or clear) is a good thing to have a lot of when something's unravelling, whether it's a ribbon or your tights or what have you.

- The belt substitutes. All of my belts are from thrift or resale stores because I never really go out shopping for belts -- it's more of a DESPERATE NEED FOR BELT that drives me to get a new belt. I have pants that will be fine on Day 1 of wearing, but around day 2 they start to mosey their way on down. So while I now have a nice little batch of belts, there have been times that I've had to improvise. Here are some of the things I've tried and used:
- a chain of paper clips (didn't work)
- a chain of rubber bands (sort of worked? but they would sometimes fling off)
- satin ribbon (worked)
- telephone cord (also worked -- the plug-in-to-the-wall cord, not the curly receiver-to-set cord)

- The busted zipper. In high school, I had a pair of jeans where the zipper pull fell off and the zipper wouldn't stay up. So I looped a safety pin into the fly, zipped it up, and then had to pin it to the front flap of the fly because it would still slip down if I didn't pin it. Somehow I had a decorative safety pin with beads on it (probably from some crafty experiment), so that became my zipper pull.

So what have been your nearly-avoided disasters, and how did you fix them? What's in your emergency kit -- or what would be in your kit if you actually had one?

Bringing it on back - Retro LUSH!

We are LUSH fans here, but at the same time, I feel like I've gotten onto the bandwagon a little late -- like there's been a whole bunch of stuff that I've missed and never knew how awesome it was. Meanwhile, the people who've been with LUSH for years have been mourning these awesome-but-not-forgotten things that completely missed my radar.

So it's been fun to see the Retro LUSH Town products popping up online -- look at the old labels! Look at all of the THINGS I never knew existed that I could try! It's enough to make my limited edition loving heart ache for things I... probably don't need. I still have so many regular-stock LUSH things that haven't been used (or used up), I don't need to add to the stash. And then there's the whole "I used it, I loved it, it's... gone forever. Dang." aspect of limited edition stuff, which I'm constantly bumping up against.

As an additional wrinkle, they're all only available online, which means I can't go sniff the shower gels (I really want Chai, but am concerned about it) or test out the perfume. (It's sixty bucks! I would at least like to try it once before I plunk down sixty bucks on a full bottle!) I've heard tell that there are some products appearing in brick-and-mortar stores, but they all say "online only", so I can't guarantee that.

It also looks like a lot of them are already out of stock, unfortunately -- snapped up by those who missed and loved them, I'm assuming! Still, I'm going to hesitate, peek into the Powell St. LUSH on Thursday (before I get my roots fixed), and see if there's anything old-school hanging around in there. (And, you know, browse around. Just a little.)

Still, it's pretty cool to poke around! Let me know if you wind up trying anything, or if any of your old favorites have returned... and are worth getting before they're gone (again!).

image from lush.com

Science Fair for July 21st-27th

A bit of a baby Science Fair this week, too much overtime!

-Olympians to watch The summer olympics are almost here! I'll probably be missing most of them this go-round, since I work nights, but I will remember fondly the past couple of Olympics, hanging out with buddies, knitting and drinking beer. Tres athletic, I know!

-Shark yourself! And it's also almost Shark Week! Now, I'm not much of a shark fan (unless it involves cinematic masterpieces such as Spring Break Shark Attack, come on now,) but I do love me some Discovery channel (probably because it's one of the few channels everyone I know can agree on and is on basic cable.) Plus, who doesn't like fooling around and making themselves look ridic? Win win!

-We can't be friends because your girlfriend says so. I probably shouldn't be posting that, but f-it. I'm not normally a Jezebel reader, but this entry hit home for me, so I'm posting it.

-Gossip Girl has started bombarding the media with new ads and previews for the Second Season. Who's excited? That's right, ME. I can't wait to see what they're going to be wearing and what music is going to be playing. Oh, and how soon Blair is going to kill Chuck. My bet's on by the third season. ;) Who wants to bet that Bart Bass is going to kick in in the second season finale? I mean, he does look identical to Caleb Nichol.

Hope everyone has a good week!

Crazy for Mad Men

Guess what tonight is!

THE MAD MEN SEASON 2 PREMIERE.

Mad Men is quite possibly the best show to come along since, say, House, or if we're talking AMC, Hustle. These are the gems of television today, my friends, and if you aren't watching Mad Men, you're out of your damn mind. Christina Hendricks is ON FIRE as Joan Holloway, she gives new meaning to the words "fierce" and "work it." Peggy Olson (played by Elizabeth Moss) is pretty much my shy, gingham-check and frumpy cardigan-wearing hero. Jon Hamm as Don Draper is just delectable, you could eat that man with some steak sauce and be happy for the rest of your life. Of course, it's not just the looks, the clothes, or the style that's unbearably wonderful, it's the dramatic tension.

Every time Don Draper goes home to his perennially diaphanous-nightgown-wearing wife Betsy (January Jones, winner of the Best Name Ever Award), you think, "Oh my god, does she know he's a sexy, sexy philandering bastard? Is he ever going to tell her about his parents?" Let's just say it's Gossip Girl for adults. I want to languish in my fantasy artists' loft smoking cigarillos, drinking scotch while watching Mad Men.

So, even though luminaries like Jezebel and New York Magazine's Vulture section are going crazy over Mad Men, I know what the true test of a great show is.

My PARENTS love Mad Men. They can't get enough of it. These are educated, book-reading, NPR-listening people. They wear glasses. They drink wine, rarely. Sure, they're Baby Boomers, no more than 10 or 12 at the time of Mad Men (1960), but they devoured the entire first season like it was manna from heaven and were doubled over in laughter and reminiscences every second. The glasses! The clothing! The Bob Newhart record! The cars! Keeping a plate in the oven for your husband! The office old-boys' club! (Note: My father remarked after the first episode that when he worked for a summer at Merrill Lynch in Manhattan in the mid-1970s, it was the callous treatment of women by male executives that turned him from big business. Good man!)

My one grievance, one nitpick, one little historical inaccuracy, is when Betsy Draper fleetingly mentions that she was in a sorority at Bryn Mawr. Bryn Mawr is a women's college, just like my glorious, Ivory Tower-ish alma mater, and obviously, single-sex institutions don't have the Greek system. The whole place is a giant sorority. You may have so-called "societies" on campus, for young ladies interested in the arts or in having afternoon tea (Smith College, adorable), where girls get to be legitimately uppity and snobbish. Those were the days, my friends, when proper young ladies went off to women's colleges to graduate with their Mrs. and a bright future in the suburbs. If you're nostalgic and/or curious about those days, definitely check out Mad Men tonight!

I'll be there in my giant plastic costume jewelry and pedal-pushers, lounging on the Taos sofa.

Gaming for Girls

So here I am, procrastinating writing my paper until the very last minute, sort of half-assedly playing cute little games online and reading about the glorious 100-year history of the FBI (love it). I just wanted to share with you all the amazing Flash-based delights offered up for your pleasure at Miniclip. Yes, Miniclip, home of the blessed Sushi Go-Round and Samurai Sam games, an ironically racist pair of games I played tonight out of curiosity. Sushi Go-Round is not bad, obviously made straight from the original Japanese version (remind Jeanne and me to tell the world about Princess Maker 2 someday), it sure makes me hungry. Samurai Sam is a more intense version of those awesome, old side-scrolling Mario Bros. games. All in all, entertaining.

Still, curiosity always gets the better of me, so I decided to investigate the rest of the site. Hmm. They happen to have an entire category of games titled, "GIRLS." Fingers crossed and hoping it wasn't going to be a completely embarrassing deluge of inappropriate up-skirt games, I clicked on said link.

Lo and behold, it was a whole matrix of games somehow geared towards girls! It's a pretty exciting thought, until you look closer and the list includes games about our perennial, girlish favorites--gardening! Show-jumping horsies! Love! Small animals! Taking care of babies! Is it just me or are these all enforcing gender rules on girls that we've been fighting for generations now to change? All girls LOVE to fall in love, play with horses, kittens, and raise babies! Check it out and tell me you don't find it just a teensy bit sexist. The alternatives are shoot-'em-up blood and gore ninja games, hooray for boys!

For full disclosure, I did play a few of the games--turns out the otherwise innocuous-seeming "Flatbread Express" is sponsored by Lean Cuisine. Because what do girls love more than babies and horses, but...DIETING!

As for me, I have quite a bit of previous experience in the realm of videogames pigeonholing girls into social stereotypes--growing up with an older brother, I was regularly told, "Karen, you can sit next to me with your baby doll and pretend you're married to one of the baseball players in my game. And that's your baby! Fun, right?" Truthfully, I always enjoyed fighting games more than playing pretend, and more often than not beat my brother hands-down playing as Chun Lee in Streetfighter. Oh, those were the days!

Screencap of Princess Maker 2 from dosgamesonline.com, game by Gainax.