New Shirt

Snow Shirt
Originally uploaded by Rozanne.

Perhaps I’ve sunk to a new blogging nadir. I’m posting a photo of my bosom—not to show off its voluptuousness (such as it is or is not), but to show off the rad T-shirt it’s wearing.

I scored the shirt at the handmade gift exchange party yesterday, and I really like it! In fact, I liked it so much I stole it right off the back of another partier. You’re allowed to do that at these things. You can either pick a wrapped gift from the pile or “steal” one of the gifts that another person has already unwrapped (even if she's been a bit previous in staking her claim to the shirt by putting it on!). The latter strategy is definitely the route to go. That way you don’t end up with a stretchy bracelet made out of red-and-green plastic chili peppers that you couldn’t wear to a dogfight.

I have to say some people took quite a bit of license with the term “handmade.” For example, my T-shirt is not handmade at all.
Some facts:

• It’s from Banana Republic. (boo!)
• It’s 100% silk. (yay!)
• It’s made in China. (boo!)
• It’s dry clean only. (boo!)
• It’s super comfortable. (yay!)
• It still has the price tag on it; it was originally $30.99 but was marked down to $16.99. (yay! I guess.)
• It has a very flattering drape/cut. (yay!)

The only thing handmade about it is the lettering, which must have taken all of five minutes to do. Contrast that with the hours and hours I spent cutting out images from postage stamps, getting my fingers Superglued together twice, and then slaving over a hot candle trying to decorate that box for my precious extremely handmade magnets to reside in. But that’s fine. I kind of admire the fact that someone thought it was a totally legit handmade gift, even though it required only five minutes of hand labor. Of course, I don’t know how much time was spent coming up with the concept. Perhaps years, even decades! That counts, right?

I’m still not sure why I like the shirt so much. I don’t pine for snow. I certainly hope that the shirt doesn’t have magical snow-conjuring powers. Just to be on the safe side, I won’t take it with me when I visit Chicago in late December. I don’t want to tempt fate and end up having to deal with a nightmare like this or this. It could happen--just ask Collene.