Shopping for clothing is frustrating. Honestly, it always is, for me, but I just got reminded of why maternity clothes are going to add extra complications without removing any constraints. An example follows:

As I go from “kinda chubby” to “where did that belly come from”, I’m running out of clothes to wear. I have two pairs of pants, a handful of solid-color t-shirts, and 5 sweaters/fleeces that are large enough to fit over the shirts, at least for now, but only 3 of which are appropriate for work. In addition, I have one or two jumper-style dresses that still fit, and a few lovely new shirts from my mother-in-law. Not quite enough for a work wardrobe, so I used some gift cards from my mother and grandmother and went shopping online. I found two beautiful sweaters, a cute skirt and two nice shirts that looked work-appropriate on Motherhood Maternity’swebsite. They were shipped to me last week, so they were here when I got back from a trip to LA. Five new things, sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, two of the five were not exactly what I’d expected. Amusingly, they are the two that are no longer on the website: a brown billowy top and a grey empire-waist sweater. The top is wearable: it’s a very thin fabric, but if I can layer underneath it I might even be able to wear it to work, and I could certainly wear it on weekends (with layers. It really doesn’t stand alone). So that’s okay.

The sweater is actually nicer than I thought I was getting—heavier weight, if a little scratchy. The scratchy is what tipped me off, though, to the fact that it’s not cotton/nylon/acrylic as I’d thought. It’s wool/nylon/acrylic, as my now itchy, pink-spotted hands can attest. I am terribly disappointed, especially since their return policy is not that great. ( I should be able to walk into a store and exchange it, as long as I can find something else. Maybe I can find the undershirts I need to go with the other one!)

Looking through their website, they do list fabric content most of the time, so I suspect I screwed it up… but that doesn’t make me any less disappointed.

I want some tall, lace-up boots.

I was looking at these 20-eyelet Dr Marten’s and the La Canadienne Olivia.
I went ahead and ordered the Olivia from Zappo’s (free shipping both ways, hooray) and I was terribly disappointed when they came. They were very narrow in the foot, and nearly too small—not what I expected when the only review had claimed they ran big!

Now I’m still looking at the Doc Marten’s and at the Timberland Women’s Charles Street Lace Boot. The problem I have with both of them is the zipper—I know it will make them easier to get on and off, but won’t it bite into your calf?

I’d had a pair of mid-calf-length lace-up black boots that I wore literally to death—the spine up the back of the boot was actually sticking out and the sole had split off when I gave them up. I just want some cute boots that I can wear with pants and dresses. Okay, that’s not true. I also want them to be matte black leather, not patent, to have 1.5-2.5” chunk/boot heels (no spike heels for me, please) and to fit my none-too-skinny calf. Maybe that is so hard..

When I got into work this morning for my one-day work week, Firefox opened the tabs I had open before Christmas. One of them was the Recollections website, with period clothing from a number of different eras.

There are lots of beautiful things, but I’ve been thinking about dresses I could wear to work, and this one is lovely: [caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”400” caption=”Suit dress “][/caption]

I can’t quite convince myself it would look fantastic on me, though. Too bad things like this are rare enough that there aren’t places to try on different styles.