tony the tailor & other shopping stories

while friends were visiting this summer, i went to the fabric market for the first time. people wanted to have some clothes made for themselves, so i thought i would too. i brought two skirts that i like, and then i would choose fabric for them to make me another skirt like it. the fabric choosing process was crazy! there were rows and rows of bolts of fabric from all different sellers trying to convince us how beautiful the fabric was and why we should buy it (it's from shanghai, it's soft, it's cheap, it will last a long time, etc.). just having so many choices was a bit overwhelming. but it helped that i needed a certain kind of fabric for the skirts i wanted made so that they would fit and hang right, so eventually i was able to choose.

then we took the fabric we chose to the tailor that our friend knows. he goes by tony, so thanks to betsy, we ended up referring to him as tony the tailor, which i think is awesome. =) he measured us very professionally and asked all the right questions about what we wanted the things he was going to make to look like. he drew sketches, and he kept the skirts that i brought so that the new ones he made for me would be exactly like it. he even measured me for one of them so that the one that he made would fit better. betsy described to him a dress that she wanted, without any kind of picture, and alissa did something similar with a skirt, pants, a top, and then picked out a dress pattern that she liked.

several days later, we came back to try everything on. the skirts i had made fit perfectly, betsy's dress was gorgeous and just needed a few alterations, and alissa's things just needed a few alterations too. i love tony the tailor!! it's pretty awesome to have clothing made exactly for you, plus both the skirts were less than 10 USD.

here are pictures of the skirts:


it's hard to tell how great they are in these pictures, but i don't have any pictures of me wearing them, so you'll have to take my word for it!

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on another shopping note, i went to auchan today because there was a certain shirt i'd bought for about 5 USD that i really liked, so i wanted go back and get a couple more. i got there, thought they weren't there, and was sad. but then i just found them around a corner later and there were a lot of them, and they were on sale for about 3 USD each!!! so i bought 5 of them (they are so great, so really it's ok), and then i found a skirt for about 6 USD, and then i found another shirt...and then it needed a tanktop to go under it... and then i found a long sleeve shirt where the sleeves were actually long enough... oh my. but i bought all of those things all together, 10 items, for about 42 USD. not bad, right? i think i may need to limit my shopping in china though... it's easy to rationalize things when the average price per item is 4 USD!! the long sleeve shirt is what brought the average up too. last winter i didn't have enough long sleeves and kept wearing the same shirts layered under sweaters over and over again (it's COLD!!), and then when i tried to buy more layers, it was nearly impossible to find sleeves that were long enough because apparently my arms are longer than chinese arms. so i when i found the long sleeve shirt, i had to buy it. i wonder a little why they were selling long sleeve shirts in july, but whatever, i will wear it later!!