Lying is one answer

Uso mo houben

The other day, I took the day off to get a breast biopsy. Yes, a breast biopsy, you know, what you do when you get an abnormal breast exam and/ or mammogram and the surgeon does to make sure it isn't cancer? Yes, that. But I didn't want to deal with explaining to my husband what a Category 3 breast lesion was, and how stabbing it with a needle and sucking out some cells involved a blood-draw-caliber needle was more a precaution than anything. I don't know if he would have been "oh, ok" like he was supposed to, or if he would have freaked out like I was afraid he would. I wasn't ready for the latter. So that morning, I packed a lunch just like almost every other day the past two weeks, and left the house when I usually did. The procedure was done by 10:30, so I drove to the mall and ate the lunch I packed in the parking lot and bought a T shirt at Uniqlo (last year's shirts were on sale at 50% off and I found the discontinued color I liked) and walked around until it was time for my consultant gig. After I finished that gig, I went to Costco and the adjacent home improvement store, and then I went to Starbucks (and remembered to NOT get a decaf latte)
and did some English proofreading and fooled around on the internet until it was the usual time for me to go home.

So technically, I've lied to my husband. Oh what a tangled web we weave. At least it was a cheap web (500 yen for the T-shirt, 380 yen for the Starbucks sakura latte).

(And it was good.)

It won't fray

Hotsurenai

Uniqlo consists of anywhere from 50 to 100% of what I'm wearing at any given moment, especially in winter. I've had a love affair with Heat Tech thermal underwear for at least the past seven or eight years. I live in it. I wear it to work, and when I get home from work, I take off my sweater and pants and throw on a fleece top over the long sleeved T and leggings, and sleep in it. I get up in the morning and throw on my windbreaker and go running (full disclosure: this happens much, much less frequently than it should).

Sometimes, though, I want to stay warm while wearing 3/4 length sleeves, and the short sleeved Heat Tech scoop neck just isn't going to hack it. Plus, the long sleeves poke out of the cuffs of my altered Uniqlo dress shirt.

So today, I altered the sleeves of my long sleeved Heat Tech scoop neck.

I cut off the extra length of sleeves.

In a perfect world, I would be filthy rich and could afford to buy and have space for a serger. But the world is imperfect. So, I folded the cuffs over twice, and stitched them down at four points with hand stitching (I could have used a sewing machine, but with only about eight points to sew a small number of stitches, I decided it was too much trouble to drag it out of the closet).

I wore it to a party under a dress with 3/4 length sleeves. It worked just fine. It has gone though the wash twice, and so far, there are no signs of visible fraying.

I've also read on a blog that you can cut the neckline open for plunging V-necks and off-the-shoulder tops, but I haven't seen any crash testing done on those, nor have I done it myself.