Last week I came home from work to find quite a few packages on my front porch. As my wife is quite the online shopper this didn't surprise me at all, but because I have recently been purchasing all the bits and pieces of my first kit I've been anxious each day to see things on the porch and then either excited or disappointed once we saw who the packages were for. This particular day though, it was my turn for excitement as two of the packages were mine and the only things I was expecting in that time period were my kilt and sporran.

So we grabbed everything off of the porch and went inside the house where I promptly stopped just inside the door and started opening them. My wife had her hands full and had to break me out of my "little kid during Christmas" state of mind to go open the gate into the kitchen (gotta keep the dogs out of the living room, thus gates) so that she could set the other things in there. So we get her things situated and then I'm right back into the living room to finish opening my things. The kilt had to come first because, you know, it's my first kilt and I'm a bit excited. I open it up and it looks great. It's an acrylic kilt from Tartanista, and I know from talking to Guinnes>Water that acrylic fabric can have sort of an oily feel to it, so we give it a nice feel and see that it's very similar to shirts that I wear at work so no problems there. I then rip the other package open and see my sporran in there, so it's time to try these puppies on and show them off to the wife!

My wife heads to the den to occupy the dogs while I head to the bedroom to try things on. I unbuckled the straps, wrapped it around and stuck that first buckle in to the last hole in the strap and...this thing is feeling a bit loose. I double check everything to make sure it's on right, I check the strap and buckle again to make sure everything is where it's supposed to be and it looks good. I buckle the rest of the straps down to their tightest setting and it's still loose.

At this point, I'm wondering if they sent me the wrong size, and I'm going to have to ship this thing back across the pond and then have them send me the right one. I went ahead and showed it to my wife and let her see what was going on, and though it does mostly stay up, it's loose enough that if I were to bounce up and down just once or twice the kilt would hit the floor.

The measuring tape just happened to be sitting there in the den, so I took the kilt off and wrapped the tape around. I ordered the kilt on May 22 when my naval waist measured 50", it shipped on the 24th, and arrived here in Texas on May 31. After those nine days, my measurement was down to 48". Also, the day before the kilt arrived, my wife decided she wanted to get back on track with Weight Watchers and, since I've promised she'll never have to diet alone, that means I'm back on it too and there's going to be even more inches going away.

I've never bothered to track the variations in my naval waist before, so I walked into that one blind. This week's lesson is clear though: if you're going to order a kilt and there's any chance that you're going to lose weight in the near future, make sure you order that kilt a size or two smaller than you need so that you have time to appreciate it before you out-shrink it.

All this time I've thought that losing weight was a good thing!

Now I've got to decide whether I should jump right into selling the old (new) one and buying another kilt, dusting off the sewing machine to make alterations to this one by moving the buckles/straps, or hold off on the kilt all together until the weight loss slows to a point where I can more accurately maintain a waist size.