I found the perfect shirt for my engagement photos; a white tailored beauty from Guess. But guess where it didn’t fit? Actually, I’ll give you two guesses…

Now normally I don’t obsess about filling out my shirts, but I’m an only child marrying a man with two beautiful sisters and a mother all blessed with big brains and gigantic…well you get the picture. It’s not uncommon for them to team up on me and joke about what they call “my peanuts”.

So you can understand that this shirt had to fit perfect. This was decided at 10pm the night before my photo session. No problem, I’ll just grab my bra made of pillows.

Hmmm…that didn’t seem to fill it out. How about wearing an undershirt as well? No luck either. Ok, desperate times call for desperate measures. I’ll try bra on bra with undershirt…haha…I bet I won’t be able to get it over my head. WHAT!!! There’s still room to pack a lunch! This is ridiculous.

As I sat there looking at my deflated chest in the mirror, I wondered how I was going to pull this off. I had to wear this shirt, it was the one. After pinching the shirt from all angles, I realized I just needed to pin up the shoulders to lift up the neckline. Easy. Where’s some safety pins?

We moved into our first home just 2 months ago so be darn if I knew where any safety pins were. The only ones I could scrounge were some giants holding up our 70’s draperies in the living-room. That’ll do. So I pinned up the shirt and tried it on for the 40th time. Lovely! Well…except for the silver metal peeking through the fabric and the uneven gaps gathering atop my shoulders. After 30 minutes of trying to pin it just right, I realized this wasn’t going to work. Time to get serious.

The last time I sewed was in 6th grade. We made sweatshirts from sewing machines and my sleeves were different lengths. Oops. I wasn’t even going to attempt that. Too many buttons and threading, this job called for the hand stitch! Now where was some thread?

My only guess for the location of thread would be in our sewing machine. You would think this would be an easy item to spot, yet it took me over 30 minutes to hunt it down in the corner of our garage. (Just in case Billy gets in the mood to sew up some britches?) I open the top to find a single needle with less than 6 inches of white thread. Are you serious? Who doesn’t have a stock of white thread? Well I would have to make due.

For the next hour, I sewed my left shoulder. Martha Stewart, watch out. When I finished I had less than an inch of thread left. Well that isn’t enough to hold up my right peanut!

So I dived into my closest and choose an old white shirt as my victim. For the next 20 minutes I carefully pulled out a piece of thread just long enough to finish the job. I totally felt like MacGyver. Finishing the second shoulder in record time, I raced to the bathroom to view my tailor skills.

Perfect! And I think they might have grown to walnuts!

Happier than a clam, I headed to bed with only 6 hours left till photo time. Guess who was going to look good now?