The Glamorous Life

By Victor Epand

 Have you ever had a pair of your favorite sweatpants and the drawstring come out when they are being washed or have they accidentally been pulled out? Do not throw away your favorite sweatpants because the drawstring can be easily fixed.

If your favorite sweatpants has ever had the drawstring broken or it has accidentally been pulled out and you have kept them simply because they were so comfortable for you to wear, then there are some very easy ways that the drawstring can be repaired. To fix the drawstring in your favorite sweatpants only takes a set of steady hands and a couple of house hold items such as a drawstring, a safety pin, or an extra long shoe lace from an old pair of tennis shoes.

First of all, if you do not have an extra drawstring there are a couple of choices to choose from such as calling your local fabric store to see if they sell any type of cord that could be used as a drawstring or simply use an extra long shoe lace that is at least twelve inches longer than the waist size of the sweatpants. To begin repairing your drawstring check to be sure that all of the old drawstring has been pulled out of the sweatpants before you attempt to replace the old drawstring with a new drawstring.

Begin replacing your old drawstring with the new drawstring by placing a knot on one end of the new drawstring, which will be the end that is not pulled through the waist band of your favorite sweatpants. Now on the other end of the new drawstring attach the safety pin, but be sure that the safety pin is attached securely so that it will not fall off. A tip for the individual is that the safety pin should be as large as possible, but small enough so that it will slide easily through the opening in the sweatpants and the elastic waistband of the sweatpants.

Continue to carefully push and pull the safety pin with the drawstring attached through the waistband of your sweatpants by constantly repeating the motion of using one hand to scrunch the fabric of the sweatpants while the other hand is pulling it taut. When the safety pin, which is attached to the drawstring, has gone completely all the way around the waistband and it reappears from the drawstring opening, then simply remove the safety pin. Once the safety pin has been removed from the drawstring be sure to place a knot on the end of the drawstring so that this end will not clip out either.

Another way to repair a broken drawstring or a missing drawstring is to take some flexible wire that is about the size of a clothes hanger and bend a tiny U onto one end. Then take the new drawstring and place the tip of it into the U of the flexible wire. Now crimp the U in the flexible wire so that the drawstring will be held tightly. The next step is to take about an inch of take and wrap the U in the flexible wire where it is holding the drawstring, which will keep the flexible wire from catching on the fabric of your sweatpants.

Next, take a carefully thread the other end of the flexible wire through the drawstring opening of your sweatpants and continue pulling the wire all the way around the waistband of your sweatpants. This action will pull the drawstring, which is attached firmly to the flexible wire, completely through the opening of your drawstrings. When the drawstring is completely pulled through the opening in your sweatpants be sure to tie a knot in each end of the drawstring so that the drawstring does not pull through the opening of your sweatpants. Now your favorite sweatpants are ready once again for you to enjoy their comfort while wearing them.

Victor Epand is an expert consultant for sweatpants, sweatshirts, outdoor gear, sports clothing, and model motorcycles. Click here when you want to find repair sweatpant drawstrings, outdoor gear, sports clothing, and model motorcycles.

Beauty

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By R.I.Chalmers

 What is success? For the cormorant fisherman in China it is catching enough food with his bird to feed his family. For the chief executive of a large multinational corporation it is providing his investors with a suitable return on their investment. For an athlete it is running the course a fraction of a second faster than the previous day. For the tired mother it is watching with satisfaction her baby sleeping soundly in its cot at night. How do you define it?

Success, or the lack of it, is often seen as one of the deciding factors of an individual’s happiness. Yet, given the subjective nature of the idea of success, perhaps any unhappiness due to lack of success is simply the result of wrong-thinking. Perhaps success is more a case of seeing what you do have and what you have achieved than dwelling on the things that you do not have and that you have not achieved.

Television, advertising, the movies, the media, are constantly bombarding us with images of impossible, unattainable success. The physical perfection of those models and actors we are faced with every day cannot but make us feel inadequate. The gleaming sports cars, the palatial houses, the fine designer clothes and the perfect human beings that populate our movies, our television screens, and our glossy society magazines make our own lives, our own situations, seem shabby and worthless.

If we were daily bombarded with images of failure, of disease, of ugliness and despair, we might paradoxically feel better about our own situations and our own lives. Yet the television producers, the advertising executives, the movie directors, and the newspaper editors are only giving us the things that we ourselves ask for. Our lives are dull and depressing enough without us masochistically heaping more woes upon ourselves. We want to be able to escape from our lives, if only for a while, and fantasise how things might have been were we not so inadequate physically and mentally. And so by our very quest for an escape from our own unsuccessful lives, we actually make ourselves feel worse about ourselves and our situation than we otherwise might.

To feel better about ourselves we need to stop yearning for impossible dreams. We need to sit alone in a quiet place devoid of the distractions that we so eagerly use to stop ourselves from seeing ourselves. And in the quiet, away from the fantasies of an unreal world, we need to look at ourselves, and see ourselves for what we really are. Only then, when we know ourselves, will we be able to understand our place in the world.

“Shallow Hal” starring Jack Black, is a wonderfully funny, thought-provoking film that demonstrates the importance of seeing beyond the external to the beauty that lies within all of us. Convinced by a hypnotherapist, while trapped in a lift, that everyone, regardless of external appearance, is beautiful, Black’s character, Hal, embarks on a life-changing adventure. Even when the spell is broken and he sees those he thought of as externally beautiful for what they are, Hal finally realises that beauty is indeed more than skin deep.

So the next time you’re tempted to judge someone or something by what they look like on the outside, try to put yourself on the inside were the reality lies. The next time you find yourself considering yourself to be unsuccessful, take stock of the things you have achieved, however small, and other things you have. We can’t all be Brad Pitt or Nicole Kidman, we can’t all be Bill Gates or Richard Branson, but we can all be ourselves. As Polonius said to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “this above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

If we can get beyond the idea that external appearance is everything, and can come to understand, as the character Hal did, that the truth that lies behind the external is far more important, we will find ourselves much closer to success than we ever dreamt possible. And if we can do the same for ourselves; can look inside ourselves, can find ourselves, and then can be true to who and what we are, we may even find that we are already more successful than we could have ever imagined.

R.I.Chalmers writes at www.richalmers.com, a great site for information about a wide variety of subjects, including crime prevention advice.

He also runs a language learning website, Linguaspectrum.com where you can find inspirational quotations and games.

Beauty

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