dressmaking for the younger crowd

If your skorts are riding up it's because they're either too small overall, or, specifically, too short in the rise (a common fit issue for long-waisted women). Rise is the distance from crotch to waist. You can buy jeans in short, average or long-rise (Wrangler Auras, for instance), but I've never seen ready-to-wear skorts with those options. The other option is to go up a size. This will allow you to wear them a little lower on the hip so you don't end up chewing cloth.

Kathleen

My skorts don't ride up, and I wear them all summer long. Maybe you're just buying them a size too small.

Sports bras - if you can get them to fit!

A friend of mine has problems. She needs a 40F but is only 5 feet tall. Most non-underwired 40F are too deep at the front. The join up the middle between the breasts is about 5"-6" deep! She needs a maximum of

2"! Never mind nipples showing through (NOT what you want when you are 50 and teach teenagers!), you don't want the top of yer bra showing over the top of a modest V neck T shirt! And wired ones have such deep sides that the bones poke her in the armpits.

I'm thinking of starting a campaign for bras for REAL women!

That's partly the fault of the shirts; they've done something to the cloth -- perhaps the new improved spinning machines -- that makes even pure cotton translucent. Luckily, linen and linen-cotton blends (but not linen-rayon blends) are still opaque.

A busy print helps a lot.

Joy Beeson

I owe you an apology, for only a few days ago I saw a dress on the street that really *was* that short. The wearer solved the exposure problem by making the skirt so full and ruffly that her underpants were lost among the petticoats -- she looked like a figure skater.

She was, however, walking rapidly from a parking lot toward an auditorium that was being converged on by herds of boys in suits and girls in long dresses -- this was not working clothes.

A lot of the dresses were satin -- is that the current dress-up fabric? (I was close to only two or three, so this could be sampling bias.) I thought the ankle-length skirts offered more scope for fashion; one I noticed appeared to be a wrap skirt sewn to a bodice; the corner was rounded in a wide curve, and conspicuous trim circled the hem and swept up to the waist, creating vertical interest that emphasized the slim cut.

Joy Beeson