An apparently common problem for we CD'ers is that women's clothing sizes are totally unreliable. The skirts my be marked as size 10, or 12 or even 14, but they all appear to be the same size - different manufacturers seem to have very different ideas as to what American women's sizes mean, especially the oriental manufacturers! It is not always convenient (or practical) to take a bunch of skirts to the men's fitting room to try them on. So how do you tell if a skirt on the rack is going to fit? A technique
I came up with is to take a piece of string along to the store. "How does that help?" I hear you ask. Well, at home I took a skirt I know fits, and cut a piece of string to be half the length of the waistband of the
skirt. (It's half the length because when the skirts are clipped onto their hangers, the waistband is doubled over and therefore only half the length.) In my case, the string ended up being 15½" long (39cm).

Now when I shop for skirts, I keep the string discretely in the palm of my hand. Then if I want to check the size, all I have to do is hold the string against the skirt waistband as it hangs on the rack and I can instantly see if that skirt is going to be too big or too small.

(This idea can be extended to size up other items. As one of my visitors (Joanne Cross) suggested, by tying knots at various positions in a longer string, you could use it to measure leg length, sleeve length etc.)