You may remember that…

You may remember that there was a whole coat saga last year. I kept that coat, in the end, but I was never very happy with it. The girl in the picture below is not me, although she is sort of disturbingly close to the fantasy version of me, i.e., what I imagine I might look like if I were twenty years younger, a foot taller, and the heroine of a fantasy novel. But she is wearing my new coat. (I was too lazy to actually take a picture of me wearing the coat. Also, Kevin was asleep. But maybe later.)

I've either been pregnant or post-partum for much of the past four years; I've been living in maternity clothes for a long, long time. The only downside of losing the last of the pregnancy/baby weight is that all my clothes were then too big for me, at a time when I was really not supposed to be spending money on clothes. I have doors and windows to buy. And floors. We have been trying to be quite careful with the rest of our budget (with only partial success). Despite all our efforts, I have, nonetheless, purchased some work clothes this fall, because it is embarrassing when your pants fall down in the middle of class. (Only sort of joking -- I managed to grab them before they actually fell down, but it was a close thing.)

I could probably have managed with a coat two sizes too big for a few more months, but the color of this coat absolutely slayed me. I have basically two colors palates I dress in -- there's a white/cream/taupe/brown set, which is what I wear when I'm aiming for casual and sophisticated. (If I don't achieve sophisticated, please don't tell me.) That tends to be what I wear through much of the spring/summer. And there's the jewel tones, mostly rich blues and purples against dark grey, and sometimes ruby or forest green. In fall and winter, when the world is grey (especially in Chicago), I long for saturated color.

I sometimes make a stab at a something more experimental, such as adding orange to the first set, but that's as likely to fail to succeed. (Note: Brown-tone oranges work much better with creams and browns than bright oranges; you'd think that would have been obvious, but I have one sweater that I have never succeeded in wearing that proves it was not obvious to me.)

Anyway, coat. Which I love:

It's still a little bulkier in the chest than I would like, but that's mostly because I'm bulkier in the chest than I would like. Sigh. A 5'0" woman should not have a DD chest. It's just ridiculous. My back is killing me on a regular basis; I can't sit on a couch for an hour without stabbing pain in my lower back. I suspect breast reduction surgery is in my not too distant future. I was only holding off because of breastfeeding, and I'm done with that now. But after all the pregnancy, caesarean, sleepless infant nights, etc., I just can't bear the thought of more surgery / illness / exhaustion yet. Maybe in the spring. It'd be nice to be a C. Or maybe even a B.

I'm having a little trouble figuring out what to do with scarves / cowls with this coat -- the neck of the coat comes up quite high, so that it seems a little pointless having a scarf over it, and it feels weird having a bulky thing under it at the neck -- my two current pieces don't work well. I think I might have to knit a thin, close-fitting, scarf for myself. After all the holiday knitting is done.