Angie’s and Bijou’s recent posts about their color capsules inspired me to pull together and assess my own color capsules for fall.

(Obviously, I have neutral items too — I’m just looking at the colors here.)

My overall concept for my fall color palette is Fair Isle: thinking about the way that traditional fair isle knitwear contains a LOT of colors, colors can be strongly contrasting, and include both warm and cool colors, but certain colors are dominant while others can be present in very small quantities yet still crucial to the overall design, and somehow it all adds up to a harmonious whole.

That’s the aspiration anyway!

Since realizing that I really like to create tonal looks rather than exactly matching colors within an outfit I’ve been mentally categorizing my color palette a little differently. Rather than individual colors I’m thinking about shades or washes. For example:

Bluesy-greensies: Photos 1-5. Teal, petrol, bottle green, duck egg/robin’s egg, cornflower blue.

Purplesy-burgundies: Photos 6-9. Plum, dusty plum, burgundy, magenta, black cherry, fuchsia.

Pales: Photos 10-13. lilac, icy lavender, rose, ballet pink, blush. (I also include white and pale gray here but for these photos I just pulled out the colors.)

So here’s my assessment of the current state of things:

Bluesy-greensies: 2 tops, 4 cardigans. To be honest the strawberry thief is not the best color scheme for me and I don’t wear it terribly often but, well, strawberry thief. Two of the cardigans (bottle green at upper left and robin’s egg at lower left) need buttons changed. They’re also basically orphaned, because they’re cropped enough that they don’t work very well with standard length shirts. The bottle green could go be paired with the pale lavender tunic but not sure about the robin’s egg.

Purplesy-burgundies: 2 tops, 3 cardigans. I like the burgundy top with the plum cardi (top right) and burgundy (bottom right) but not sure I dig the plum top with the burgundy cardi. I wore that plum/gray cardi a ton last fall but now I’m wracking my brain to remember what I paired it with…

Pales: 4 tops (2 woven, 2 pullover sweaters, longer length).

Overall: 8 tops, 7 toppers.

Only the plum and pale lilac tunics are long enough to be worn with leggings. Everything else must be worn with structured skinnies.

2 pairs of shoes but they are really only useful in transitional weather, not in chilly-wet fall.

And I’ve included scarves here as well, although to be honest I’m not wearing small scarves all that much these days (just feels overdone for a day spent working from home) and the larger ones just come into play as outerwear.

This is sort of my perpetual problem with my wardrobe. Lots of stuff, but the whole always seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts.

Thanks for reading. Grateful for any thoughts you care to share.