I Sewed a Dress!

This is what the pattern suggested the dress might look like.

And this is how it turned out by the time I was done with it! Hurray! My first dress sewn on my sewing machine!

I'm rather well-known for my tendency to be emphatically different. You could look at it as a genetic predisposition  for, after all, I was born left-handed into a right-handed world. Some might argue that I live differently for no good reason, just for the heck of it. And, on occasion, I'd say they'd be right. I had no good reason for my vicious opposition to skinny jeans in the past, really, other than the fact that everyone else loved them.

However, for me, being different is a way of life. From boycotting random articles of clothing (i.e. shorts, peplums, and floral print pants), to majoring in an rather unusual subject, to refusing to eat any and all fast food, to declining to watch current popular tv shows....if you know me, you know that if everyone's doing something, I'm most likely not doing it.

I think an accurate word for me would be ornery. I honestly really enjoy living outside the more common lifestyle. If everyone's interested in having Pinterest-friendly houses, I prefer hand-me-down furniture rejected from my grandparent's house to spending a dollar on stuff that you only really need to sit on and put bookshelves in.

When other people talk about enjoying a nice glass of wine, I'm over here saying: "I gave alcohol one chance and it tasted yucky, so never again!"

This isn't a new characteristic for me. Angel's told me more than once that he thought I was really weird when he first got to know me. I don't think his judgement of the weirdness has been altered since then, he's just grown to appreciate it a little more. I was a teenager when for some class project, we were assigned to write those six-word memoirs, and what I came up with is: "I'm different, to make a difference."

And I hope those six words do become true of me. I've always heard talk of peer pressure, and occasionally I've seen it in action, but I've never actually felt it myself. To give a current example, even though I'm currently surrounded by lovely pregnant ladies, I feel absolutely no pressure to join the club. The fact that everyone else is doing something never makes me feel any inclination to do what they are doing. . What I hope is that people do notice the differences in the way I live my life--not just the silly differences that I'm mentioning here, but the important ones, and I hope that seeing my way of living a life not dictated by the fashions of the time will encourage others not to be bound by that peer pressure, either.

I know that for many people, style, fashion, and what everyone around them is doing does matter, and does influence them, and I want to give people hope that it doesn't have to be that way! And one more thing I must make clear--my different-ness....the fact that I have no interest whatsoever in being normal...does not come from me. I believe it's a gift of God.

After all, I'm a 20-something, grown, married woman waltzing around the grocery store in a SPARKLY and POLKA-DOTTED red and purple home-made dress and high heels, and smiling about it. That kind of freedom/creativity/insanity/pure weirdness can't be  blamed on a mere human, so it must be God!