Although I've been away from the forum for a while, I've been thinking about building a capsule wardrobe for a while.

It started when we booked tickets on a river boat to take my mother-in-law to view the Queen's Diamond Jubilee River Pageant. She is an ardent monarchist (my mother-in-law, although I am sure the Queen is a monarchist, too ) and wants us to wear red, white and blue. I thought that would be easy, but found that despite having a dark indigo denim skirt and dark trouser jeans, and quite a bit of white, for a person who loves red, I have very little. From there (I don't know why, it's how my mind works, I suppose) I started to think about building a spring/cool summer capsule wardrobe. We only have a few weeks of really hot summer here in the UK (just had one of them, actually, forecast rain for the Pageant, unfortunately), so hence the 'cool summer' definition. I have a little collection of 'hot summer' clothes which are pretty much ok, but not much for the cooler summer days (sort of high sixties, very low seventies, temperature wise).

So, my plan has been (and it's still a plan, I've been busy with course work and not able to shop) to use navy as one of my neutrals, with some white, red and teal/turquoise (favourite colours). My 'hot summer' capsule relies on white linen trousers, white shorts etc as a base, so the capsules will interlink nicely.

I DID have only little foray out shopping, and found it so much easier to look at things and think - will this look nice with navy (or white) bottoms - if it's a print, does it have some of the colours in my capsule in it? And accessories - just HOW much easier is it to look at necklaces and limit yourself slightly to certain colours? It's like a revelation! I don't feel as overwhelmed.

I am still not sure what my style could be described as - I only know what I don't like (frills, fullness and volume). But I feel much more like I'm getting there.

In other news I've still not managed to hem all my cropped trousers to a better length, that's one of my jobs to do. I have, however, found a dress which I am going to post here for opinions - I've been looking for a casual-ish dress for summer for a couple of years now, and bought one I think might be ok recently. And having got my legs out for the first time in ages since I hemmed some crops to bermuda length, I would now like to find some skirts - I have a high hip though and skirts that suit that shape are rarer than hen's teeth in the stores here. I might have to sew myself one - another project!

Thanks for reading - no comment necessarily required lol