For forty years I stood behind women on a fitting box in Dayton, Ohio, with pins in my mouth and a tape around my neck. I'm five foot two and a size sixteen myself. This is everything I learned about dressing a body like ours.
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A retired school librarian, five foot one, a size eighteen, with a round tummy and slim legs. "Every one of them looked fine on the hanger," she said. "Every one of them is wrong on me. I think I'm just built wrong now."
I had her step up on the box. The waistband sat two inches below her belly button and rolled the moment she bent. The seat sagged. The hems puddled on the floor like a bathrobe belt. Three separate problems, and not one of them was her.
We took in the back seam, she switched to a mid-rise for her next pair, and I hemmed all four so the front just kissed the top of her shoe. When she stood on that box in the finished pair, she said, "My legs came back."
That's what I want for you.
I'm Dottie Callahan. I learned to sew at my mother's black Singer on the kitchen table, took the alterations counter at a dry cleaner at nineteen, and ran my own little shop from 1985 until I retired. Most of my customers were women over fifty, and a great many of them were built like me. This book is what I told them.
Clothes on the rack are cut for a taller, straighter woman. Change the hem, the rise, the neckline, the layer and the color, and the same body looks put-together.
One pair of trousers you never wear costs more than this book.
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It's the cheapest alteration with the biggest result, and I did thousands of them. Take the trousers and the shoes you'll wear most with them to the tailor together. For a straight leg, the front of the hem should just touch the top of your shoe with no folds. The back should sit about half an inch above the point where your shoe meets the floor.
And never make one pair do two jobs. Keep your dressier trousers hemmed for your dressier shoe and your everyday pairs hemmed for flats. A plain hem costs about $12 to $20, and it gives a short woman back inches of leg.
That's one page. The book has 114.
Every chapter goes the same way: the mistake I watched women make, what the fitting room taught me, the fix step by step, what to walk past in the store, and a checklist to take with you.
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Dottie Callahan · 114-page PDF · reads on any phone, tablet or computer
I'm Dottie Callahan. I was born in Dayton in 1958. I let out waistbands, took up trousers, moved buttons, fixed gaping blouses and saved mother-of-the-bride dresses the night before the wedding, from 1985 until I retired in 2025.
I'm sixty-eight now, five foot two, and I wear a size sixteen. I've had this tummy since my fifties, I like color, I like a good earring, and I like to be comfortable at lunch.
Nothing in this book asks your body to change. Not one word about dieting.
It's written for one woman: short, curvy, carrying her weight through the middle, over sixty. If you're two of those four, most of the book is yours. The measuring chapter tells you exactly which fixes fit your shape.
No. Every fix is something you can buy, something a tailor can alter, or something you can swap from your own closet. A lot of it starts with the clothes you already own.
No. There's nothing about losing weight and nothing about squeezing into anything. We change the hem, the waistband, the neckline, the layer and the color, never you.
No. A few small fixes, like a snap on a gaping blouse, take five minutes with a needle. For everything else the book tells you what to ask a tailor for and what it should cost.
No. It's a PDF, 114 pages. It opens on your phone, tablet or computer, and you can make the type bigger by spreading two fingers on the page. Print it at home or at your library if you like paper.
Press any Buy button on this page. Pay once on the secure checkout. The page that opens right after you pay has your download button, and the same link is sent to your email. No account to set up, no password to remember.
No. One payment of $37, one time. No membership and no monthly anything.
The trousers, the tops, the layers, the colors and the alterations, every one shown on a short, curvy body. All in one book.
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