Hi,

This is going to be an extra long post, as there were some interesting developments (hurricane in the boutique discussed about halfway down) that came up. Current wardrobe totals are near the end. I tried to underline some subtopics in case you have a specific one in mind.

To read more about the challenge, including the rules, click here.

For a recap of week 5, click here.

I'll do another recap in two weeks (week 8) as I think the cool/cold weather wardrobe is set after this week.

Reflections for Week 6

It can help to have multiple seasons in one closet.

Living in a four season climate I used to store at least half of my wardrobe outside of my working closet. And certainly in the middle of winter, I am not going to want to wear my shorts. But sometimes we have swings in temperatures (25F one day, 50F the next) and it is helpful to have cool and cold weather items in the closet at the same time. Before I started this challenge I had my entire 4 season wardrobe in my closet and it was helpful to grab a lighter weight item on the occasional warm weather day in the middle of winter. Or I would grab a heavier cardigan for the a/c at work in the summer. I am missing having all the seasons in one closet.

Also, sometimes I see warm weather clothes in the stores right now. Being able to easily see what I own helps me stay on track and not purchase items that are duplicates when I am tempted to shop for something out of season.

I need season specific clothes.

I am freezing in some of my outfits, even with thermals and fleece lined hose as my bottom layers. Apparently you can only layer items so much before you need to shift to another material for warmth. Some of my lighter weight knits worked great for our cool weather days but are just not warm enough now that our
temperatures have dropped, leading me to start adding in some pieces for cold
weather.

I don’t need too many season specific clothes.

I have to be very careful with how many season specific items I own. Since we do have four seasons, you don’t have too long to sport a season specific item before the weather shifts again. This is one reason why I am able to get away with 2 pairs of shorts in our summer months. We get roughly 3 months of hot weather, yet I only sport shorts on the weekends. So that’s only 12 times I can wear shorts
before they sit waiting for hot weather again. And since I own two pairs, that’s only 6 times each! I am currently repeating my tweed blazer as often as I am comfortable doing so, since it will only be a few months before tweed will not work for the current weather or time of year.

I’m slowly growing my wardrobe.

I realized that I have 4 knit tops that are not working for our cold weather, even with
layering a thermal underneath and a blazer or cardigan on top. Yet these tops were ideal when we had our cool weather days. So I am not returning them to the boutique, merely adding in some “replacement items” to round up the wardrobe for our cold weather.

Here are the additions.

Photo 1-Pattern for a pattern. Ivory leopard pattern top that is three-quarter sleeves for the ivory patterned cardigan.

Photo 2-Stripe for a solid. Striped layering knit that is lightweight for a solid layering turtleneck. (I have four black turtlenecks so I figured I should probably start adding them into my current rotation!)

Photo 3-Like color for like color. Grey layering knit that is lightweight for grey layering knit that is heavier weight. Grey is a big layering color for me, it’s one of the few softer colors I always see every year for cold months.

Photo 4-Like style for like style. Blue hoodie that is lightweight for a coral (orange?) hoodie that is heavier weight. This coral hoodie is one of the only bright colored toppers I have in the boutique for cold weather.

Hurricane in the boutique.

The boutique had a major problem this week. The shelf fell. Apparently the weight of all the clothes hanging from it plus all the clothes folded on top of it, was too much and it ripped the supports right out of the wall. DH was NOT happy. Unfortunately this just supports his thinking that I own too many clothes.

Photo 5-Everything thrown onto the floor and onto one rod in the working closet, because the hurricane happened in the middle of the night and there was no time to fix the problem before going to work the next day.

Photo 6-The relocated/organized boutique which is now sitting inside my working
closet. Not ideal but it will have to do. I organized everything by categories, so that when I shop I can just grab the appropriate bag. One reason why the “boutique” was working so well, was because I could not see the clothes everyday. So I maintained this concept by putting everything in opaque bags with labels and covering the tops with tissue paper. I also created a list of everything in the bags, this way I am not tearing everything apart if I realize I want to add a specific item.

Photo 7-My pre-shopping for spring/summer items. I wanted to start the spring/summer the same way I started the challenge for fall/winter, by slowly adding items one at a time. However, I ran out of boutique storage space, so I had to pre-shop. I selected roughly the same numbers of items that I currently have for fall/winter and will have to see how this goes a few months from now, when we enter our spring/summer seasons. One thing I do like, is having all 4 seasons back inside one closet, even though it is a bit cluttered with all the boutique bags on the top shelves. Apparently I got used to all that extra space in there!

I shopped outside of the boutique, again.

During week 5, I shopped in the stores and promptly returned the items the very next day. At the time I realized I wasn’t shopping for the “right items” and I purchased not one, but a whole bunch of NEW outfits. This week I went shopping again! Why would I do this when I have an entire bag of perfectly good jeans sitting in the boutique? Because every single pair of jeans in the boutique, is blue. One or two are a lighter or darker wash than the rest but they are all a shade of blue. And I’ve been saying for weeks that I’d love to lighten up my wardrobe with a light colored bottom. So when Angie mentioned BR had cream jeans on sale, I pounced.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do when they arrive. None of my current bottoms are worn enough to need replacing, and I already know that 6 bottoms is my limit so I do not want to make an addition to this category.

Assuming the new jeans fit, I have a few options to pick from:

1. Return the jeans when they get here since there was no current “need” to replace any bottoms.
2. Keep them and figure out which bottom I am going to donate so that I can maintain one-in/one-out in the working closet.
3. I could technically just “return” a pair of bottoms to the boutique, but that feels like cheating. I wouldn’t normally return used items to a store so why would I do that with the boutique? Then the boutique will never get any smaller and at some point I’d prefer not to have a boutique at all!
4. Demote a pair of jeans for gear use. I have been using a pair of the skinny jeans as dual purpose (work and gear) and horseback riding in the winter with the slush and the mud can get really messy. Actually there’s one pair I’ve been sporting often as gear already anyway, so this may be a good option. But is this also cheating because again it is growing the size of the total wardrobe? However, I would not wear the new cream jeans for riding (or any light color jean for that matter) because that is just not wise, so technically I would be down a pair of gear jeans if I do not demote a pair.

At the end of week 6, I had 51 items for cool/cold weather:

6 bottoms (no change)

2 hoodies (added one heavier weight for cold days)

11 toppers (this includes: pullover sweaters, blazers and cardigans; added one cardigan)

10 knits (added 3 heavier weight)

3 gear items (no change)

1 shirt (for layering; no change)

3 LS T’s (for layering; no change)

4 tanks (for layering; no change)

5 thermal layers (added one
thermal bottom)

4 scarves (no change)

2 workout outfits (top and bottom; no change)

Because of the hurricane, I have also added the following 32 items for warm/hot weather:

4 bottoms (To freshen up for spring/summer I’m adding in 3 new pairs; a boyfriend jean, a white bootcut jean, a cobalt jean, and a placeholder for a pair of white straight leg jeans when I finally find them. I plan to carry over two bottoms from cool/cold weather to round this out to 6 total which has been working well so far.)

1 hoodie (A fun printed hoodie [it has pineapples on it] for weekends, plus I anticipate the lighter weight one from fall working well here if I need a second, or that one may become gear wear by then.)

6 toppers (this includes: blazers and cardigans; I added lightweight items here since I layer in a/c settings; black knit blazer, black printed bomber, green army jacket, navy kimono/cardigan [new item that has been on backorder for a while but I’m leaving a spot open for it], white cardigan, black cardigan. I also plan to carry over the denim jacket from cool/cold weather clothes to round out this category to 7 items.)

6 knits (4 three-quarter sleeve [white cable, light grey cable, dark grey open stitch, navy tunic], and 2 long sleeve [navy, grey/mint stripe] )

1 gear item (I switch to bootcut jeans for spring/summer riding but that’s as far as I have thought this through so far)

5 shirts/blouses (I anticipate the white shirt being worn out by end of winter so will replace that with a white/black dotted blouse. Also adding a few more because they work well for warmth in a/c settings; black/white stripe blouse, black tiger print, denim, sheer black three-quarter sleeve])

2 LST’s (I anticipate being able to carry over some of the lighter eight one’s form cool/cold weather so I only add two printed one’s here, one is actually three-quarter sleeve)

5 SS T’s and SS Tops (new category for spring/summer, LST’s will be replaced with SS T’s, they can either layer under a topper or stand alone; 3 t-shirts [one black, one white, one purple printed], and a peplum top and a white/black printed knit)

X tanks (for layering; no additions yet here, I’m going to try to carry over from cool/cold weather items before adding here)

X scarves (haven’t thought this far yet)

X workout outfits (top and bottom) (haven’t thought this far yet)

2 shorts (new category for spring/summer, this number worked well last year so no change)

I'll try to post outfits soon and thanks for reading!

Edit to add: And here are the outfits.