help me with easy girl pattern?

Your skirt sounds yummy!

I think that pattern will adapt very well and look lucious in brown velour.

A considerable number of years ago, before she adopted my old Toyota serger, Big Sis adapted a kimono pattern and made me a fleece dressing gown. Despite it's acknowledged faults (she was fairly new to sewing and certainly new to fleece!), I love this thing and am snuggled up in it now! It's getting a bit thin at the elbows... :D

Thanks! It was a stash bit a friend gave me a few years back... To seventies orange for her! It's this year's (and last year's) accent colour in my winter (brown!) wardrobe!

I love red meat Beth, but it does NOT love me! Guaranteed to set off the IBS! Grr! What I'd give for a nice juicy fillet steak, rare and red and grilled to perfection! I get plenty of iron from other meats and greed leafy veg (LOVE my veg!).

I make do with small amounts of the red stuff, judiciously spaced.

The diet has made the fibro easier to cope with, and while I have quite a thin face, at 5'3" and 149 lbs, I'm not at all skinny! I could do with losing another half stone or so.

I looked like a beached whale or a hippo in drag when I was fat! Like this:

for the weird diet: I'm experimenting with gluten free for now... As I've only been on this for a month, I can't tell yet whether it's helping the fibro (though the flare seems to be dying down), but it has certainly made a noticeable difference to the IBS! Nothing like so bloated and grumbly in that department! But I do miss proper bread, and James viciously ate a toasted bagel at me for breakfast this morning! :D :D

The snake oil is actually emu oil, and my hands do feel better this week.

Kate, I'm glad that losing the weight has made you more comfortable but I hate hearing you speak of yourself at a heavier weight with such loathing. Every day my beautiful daughter is hammered by messages from our sick society that tell her she's not pretty enough, not thin enough, that she has to look a certain way, act a certain way to be worthwhile.

I do the best I can to counteract the poison by rewarding her for being smart, kind, brave, strong, by pointing out the airbrushing, photoshopping, the signs of surgery and augmentation and injection in media images. And, while I also have the usual insecurities about my own body she never sees me standing in front of a mirror poking at myself, speaking hatefully about features that are, in fact, completely normal for a human female.

It may be less personal for you as the mother of a son, but he's still absorbing your attitudes and values and will be applying them to the women and girls around him.

Nope! Wasn't a bit like that for me... I NEEDED to lose the weight for several health reasons (the fibro, the IBS, chronic oedema, and the gall bladder... ), but the way I looked TO ME in the photo I saw of a very dear friend's wedding was the trigger for doing it *at that point*. I'd made a dove grey frock for the wedding, and I really did NOT look good! No way round it: 15 stone on a 5'3" frame in a rumpled grey frock on a HOT day... UGH! I tried hiding under a huge black hat, but it didn't come down far enough! No way did I look happy almost as wide as I was high!

And I never loathed myself: I just needed to feel better, physically. I needed to be able to climb the stairs without getting puffed out, stand for more than 10 minutes without my feet swelling, reduce the weight strain on my joints, give my innards less fat to cope with so I wasn't turning inside out every week or so, and generally get fitter!

I don't do that either! There's a mirror for the customers on the wall on the landing, so I catch a glimpse of myself when I flit past, but I don't stand there looking at the lumps and wishing I was thinner/less lumpy/prettier/whatever... I'm usually looking to see that the hem is straight, the sleeves are good, the style is good on me as I am now. On the physical side, I'm more likely to be checking to see how bad the varicose veins are on the back of my legs!

The fat was NOT normal for me: my natural body type is slim. I'd just got VERY lazy and ate too much for my activity levels. I'm still over ten stone. I've NO intention of trying to get back to the 8 stone 20" waist levels of my teens and early 20's! I'll be happy with a BMI of 25 rather than 36! If I lose nine pounds I'll go from my present BMI of

26.4 down to 24.8, which is good enough, thank you.

If you are on the higher end of the healthy weight range for you hight, that's fine by me. Some folk are just a lot better off with a little more padding. I have no argument with that, and be damned to the detractors! There are way too many folk drifting around looking ill, with no energy because they want to look like Kate Moss when they'd be better looking (and eating!) like Nigella Lawson!

Fret not about that! He likes lasses with muscles that can do things, not stick insect skinnies! Remember, he's used to his mum carting sewing machines about, and his female pals at school being better at football than he was! Skinny models are out: healthy gals with muscles from dancing, sports, walking the hills, skiing are MUCH better looking in our books!