Day 98: $5 T-Shirt

 

Before and after. I bought some socks from Ardene's (coolest socks ever. They have lace on the ankle! Five pairs for $10. I needed taller socks to wear with my ankle boots), and I found this shirt. It was maximum $5, and I liked it. The dip-dye thing, along with all of the animal things hanging off of a femur. Kind of cool. However, I'm not a fan of text. The text 'Wild Child' paired with things that are strikingly relate-able to prehistory and Native culture... It strikes me as one of the worst kinds of appropriation. It actually kind of bothers me as to how many cool looking shirts with wild and woods-like things have text that suggests weird relationship going on in terms of appropriation. I don't agree with appropriation, especially in the context of teen girl clothing, because I really think that the Native people have enough issues without upper middle class teenagers pretending to understand the culture. I really appreciate Native American cultures, beliefs, and traditions. However, as a white person with absolutely no native blood, I can't pretend that I am really part of it. Yes, it has become a part of North American culture because of the whole Cowboys and Indians thing, but that's not really how it should be. 

Any ways, because of my stance on this, and thinking it's genuinely terrifying to have the words 'Wild Child' paired with a femur and several voodoo-like gems, animal parts, and twigs (seriously. The femur looks HUMAN), I decided to alter it! I removed the text, and altered the shape a bit. I might do more to it, but I shall see. I wouldn't do that to a shirt that costed more, but it was 70% off. I find that to be do-able in terms of taking creative liberties. Especially when the shirt would have been better without the words to begin with. I wish that I could have kept more of the femur, but it didn't work out. Too bad, since it was my favourite part of the shirt. Maybe I'll just silkscreen shirts with bones on them. Like a femur. Or an atlas bone! Atlas bones are my favourites. 

I also made pretzels. I ate 3/4 of the recipe over the span of the day (this is equivalent to six pretzels). Now that I have more spare time, I'm going to return to making myself cook more. I enjoy it, but I'm so lazy.