• Mood: anxious

This post now contains 50% more usefulness! (Edit: pictures now added)

After almost four years of lurking around the internets, loli photo blogs and looking at pictures of beautiful clothing that I'd never be confident enough to wear in public, I finally just said screw it and took the plunge today. :)

I'm syn. I'm new to lolita fashion, and something of a newbie, actually. I've always loved the look of lolita fashion, especially sweet lolita--I'm a sucker for tooth-meltingly adorable clothes. :D Never been actually adventurous enough to try wearing it in public--but I figured, being an enormous tech nerd and engineering major, I don't have enough feminine hobbies anyway and people look at me funny to begin with, so why fight it? :)

I bought my first dress today, a pink and white jumper dress from Baby, the Stars Shine Bright boutique in San Francisco. Sort of an impulse buy, really... my partner and I went there to window-shop yesterday, and I saw an adorable dress from last year's line marked down 50% off. And it actually fit me! So I bought it.

Now I'm trying to put together a complete outfit, and I'm a bit overwhelmed... most of the searches online I made turned up this community as a great resource, so I'll be doing a lot of reading here!

As many people have already mentioned, this post needs to be more useful than it is. So I'll ask some questions. I bought a dress, but the store didn't have any petticoats in stock. I'm also looking for the rest of the outfit, but I suppose it would be easier for people to answer this question if they knew what my dress looked like.

I've already found Sweet Rococo's website, and they have two different petticoat models that have different shapes. I'm wondering which one would be best for my dress, since I can't actually try them on.

I'm also in dire need of a place to buy shoes that are big enough for my feet and aren't of horribly low quality. It used to be possible to find simple round-toe Mary Janes, but that fashion seems to have faded. My shoe size is 10.5 US, but it seems to vary a bit depending on manufacturer. Some shoes I can wear size 10, others I need a size 11, but most it's 10.5. It's a hard size to find for anything, but it seems even harder for lolita style shoes. Most of the websites I have found are either very shady, or only go up to US size 8.5... much too small.

Sorry for my reading fail. D:

Pictures of the dress, so that recommendations might be easier: