Fashion Quest--Part I

The first wedding (I'm invited to) for this fall/winter season is in less than two weeks.  Some people would wait until the day before to plan what to wear.  Others (like me) need or want to plan in advance.  For me, the planning in advance is both a need and a want.  I need to because I only get paid once a month.  I want to because my OCD causes me to panic if I'm not prepared well in advance.  But, no panic attacks for me!  At least not in regards to what to wear to the wedding.

It's not enough to just worry about myself.  I have to help my mother, too.  About six weeks ago, we sat down with plus-size catalogs and my laptop to get an idea of what was out there for this fall.  It quickly hit home that, for my mother, we were going to have to plan her outfits around her shoes.

My mother loves these shoes.

Shoes? you ask.  Well, you would until I tell you that my mother has horrible terrible nasty bad feet.  First, she has tophaceous gout.  Gout is a form of arthritis.  Tophi are nodular masses of uric acid crystals.  I was going to put a picture of it here, but, trust me, it isn't pretty.  Second, my mother's feet have always been wide.  She could never get shoes at Sears or Penney's.  She always had to go to special shoe stores (before wide-widths became standard in most stores).  Third, she has sprained her ankles more times than I care to count, which has left her ankles somewhat . . . misshapen.  All of this means that my mother's shoes are difficult to find and very expensive.  Since she had a fairly dressy pair of navy blue MaryJanes, we had to work with those.

After a few days of perusing catalogs and surfing the net, we decided that, for mom, she would get a dressy pair of navy pants and then different tops for each wedding.  My mother's style is rather oxymoronic.  She loves sparkles and froufrous and embellishments, but doesn't want anything gaudy.  ?!?!  The first top turned out to be relatively easy to find.  She found, in Roaman's catalog, a grey beaded top and was awestruck.
It was rather pricey, but I told her to be patient.  I get two or three emails a week from Roaman's and others with discount codes.  Once my mother makes up her mind, however, she does not want to wait!  (And you wondered how I got to be the way I am?)  Fortunately for both of us, that very evening I received an email for 40% off one item.  Wow!  I'd been hoping for 30% off and expecting 25% off, but this was great.  I didn't even bother with the intercom.  I ran down the stairs and burst into her bedroom.  Well, okay, I hurried down the stairs and carefully pushed her bedroom door open.  I had to mute the TV first, which entailed a search for the remote-control, which had gotten tangled in her blanket and buried under some books.  I told her the good news and her eyes lit up!  "Go order it!" she demanded.  I realized at that point that I should have waited to tell her because I still had a week before I got paid.  I assured her the coupon would still be good and it wasn't likely that the top would be out of stock in a week's time.  It was one of the loooongest weeks of my life!  That last week or so before I get paid is always a killer.  This time I could have cheerfully committed murder.  My mother fretted and fussed the whole week.  I'm surprised she didn't make me wait up the night before payday to wait for the direct deposit to show up in the bank.  But I did make sure I ordered it before I went down to breakfast!

The ordeal was NOT over at that point.  Every day she asked if the package from Roaman's came.  "Not yet" became my mantra.  I didn't even point out to her that it didn't ship until four days later.  It arrived two days after shipping, though, so she had it in less than a week.  It is very pretty:

I found a short necklace at Fashion Bug that has pewter and blood-red beads.  That'll give her some color by her face.  There was some upset when she realized that the V-neck showed more of her bypass scar than she would like.  This prompted a whole 'nother search for a cami or tank that would go under it without looking tacky.  I found a silver shell in some obscure mail-order store that (fingers crossed) should look very nice with it, hide her scar and look great with the pewter-and-red beaded necklace.  Now we are waiting for that to arrive!

Note:  This narrative will take a few postings to tell.  I will show parts of the outfits as we go along and then post pictures of us in all our finery.