What should I wear this spring?

First, let me say that I realize the question in the title of this post is pretty ridiculous, as in belated, to be asking the last few days in May. But this was a time-consuming post to put together, and I've been noodling on these ideas for a while. And in any case, I think what I'm about to say is applicable to dressing for any season of the year.

For the past year and a half or so, as I've mentioned before, I have been experimenting with seasonal capsule wardrobes to help organize my closet and streamline getting dressed.

I still love the idea of this, and especially of having distinct color palettes for each season. But lately I have to admit that my capsules haven't, so far, quite done what I hoped they would do.

Even though I like the individual items in my capsules, and think that most of those items are relatively versatile, I often struggle to quickly and easily pull together outfits that I'm excited to wear and end up feeling good in.

That's the real purpose of a capsule wardrobe, isn't it? To be a reliable, relatively stress-free source of great outfits.

And yet up until now I've more been focused on the collection of items in my capsule rather than the individual outfits that they make. Which is sort of natural -- after all, those capsule wardrobe collages you see all over the place online sure are pretty. (So pretty, in fact, that I couldn't help but put one right at the top of this post.) But I wonder if maybe I've been thinking about it backwards.

And along with the idea that I should be somehow building my capsules around outfits rather than individual items, there's also the suspicion that I haven't included quite the right items in my capsules so far. But how to figure out what those right items are? And how many of them should there be? I've been skeptical of what I perceive as* arbitrary number limits in various capsule wardrobe schema, but I think I've probably had too many items in my capsules up to now.

*(That's foreshadowing, by the way.)

All of this was rattling around in my brain when Janice of The Vivienne Files introduced her "1 Piece at a Time" capsule wardrobe concept earlier this year. I was immediately smitten.

The system begins with a favorite outfit of three pieces -- bottom, top, second layer. From there, you add clothing one piece at a time -- add a top, then a second layer, then a bottom -- remixing the new pieces with existing ones to create new outfits with each addition. This rotation repeats until you reach a total of 16 items (an extra top gets added in towards the end).

Janice presents this system as a purchasing strategy -- a way to build a coherent wardrobe over time by adding pieces to your closet one by one. But I thought I would see if it could also work as a strategy to build a capsule wardrobe from the clothes already in my closet. Here's how it went:

Initial outfit

I chose an outfit that is quintessentially Seattle spring to me: Classic nautical color scheme, but warm enough for the chilly days we tend to have here especially early in the season (I could have worn this outfit yesterday, to be honest). So my wardrobe starts out with three items: jeans, a Breton-striped tee, and my Aran cardigan. (Janice's scheme doesn't include shoes or accessories, but I've shown them in some outfits in this post.)

Item 1: teal fine-gauge cotton sweater

Since I started out with a patterned top, I'll add one in a solid color. These are all images of my actual clothes, by the way.

And now I can make a second outfit:

Item 2: charcoal gray cardigan

I have a light-colored cardigan, so I'll add a dark one.

And now I can make two more outfits:

 


Item 3: coral skinny cords

My first pair of pants were made of medium-wash denim, the most basic of neutrals. So let's mix it up with a bright pair of pants here.

From here on out, with each item added to my capsule I'll show four additional outfits I can make:

 

 

Here's my capsule wardrobe so far, after one round of additions:

Item 4: gray/white striped popover

My first two tops are dark knits, so let's add a light-colored woven shirt.

Four more outfits:

 

 


Item 5: Navy argyle cardigan

Adding a patterned cardigan at this stage in the game seems bold, but I know I like pattern-mixing with this piece, and its longer length matches well with the skinny pants I have in the rotation so far.

The outfits:

 

 

Item 6: Black skirted leggings

A dark-colored bottom option is always good to have.

And now I can wear:

 

 

An update on how the capsule is shaping up:

Item 7: black watch plaid button-up

Another subtly patterned woven shirt, but this time in a rich, dark palette (it's more vivid in real life, promise).

The outfits:

 

 


Item 8: Teal cardi

So far my top layers are neutral or semi-neutral, so here's a color -- and in a slightly different silhouette.

The outfits:

 

 

Item 9: Gray skinny jeans

Jeans are a wardrobe staple for me, so I'll add another pair, in a different color.



And now I can wear these outfits:

 

 

The capsule after three rounds of additions:

Item 10: Chambray popover

A long shirt that works well with skinny pants, and will work now that I have gray jeans in the mix (I'm not a fan of blue-denim-on-denim, so I wouldn't likely wear this top with the blue jeans).

More outfits:

 

 


Item 11: Black-trimmed ivory cardi

I love my Aran cardi, but it's very casual. Here's a sweater in a similar color that gives me a more polished option.

And these are the outfits I can now create:

 

 


Item 12: Eyelet-trim striped tee

The "extra" top. Breton stripes are a signature pattern for me in spring and summer -- here's a lighter variation on the top I started out with, with a little whimsy for good measure.

And here's what I'll wear it with:

 

 


Item 13: Green A-line knit skirt

Finally, a skirt to round things out.

And the final set of outfits:

 

 


And the final capsule:

What worked about this system for me:

• I really like that the process begins with a single outfit -- that's such a manageable starting point. I think even people who don't feel great about their wardrobe in general usually have at least one outfit they like to wear. It's great to begin from that place of confidence.
• The process encouraged me to think through why I was adding each item to my capsule -- not just "do I like this item" but "how does it function as part of the whole."
• It also focuses on the creation of outfits, not just the assembly of the capsule -- exactly what I had felt was missing from my previous forays in this area.
• This is the first capsule wardrobe scheme I've encountered that accommodates my need for layering. Most capsule-building advice leaves you with something like a blazer and two cardigans, but this system gives me roughly equal numbers of tops and second layers. Yay!

What didn't work:

• I found it difficult to introduce different silhouettes into my wardrobe. I am picky about the proportions between the top and bottom of an outfit, and as a result I felt a bit trapped in the "skinnies / top / long sweater" outfit formula that I started out with.
• I also felt constrained by the small number of items to choose from, especially early on in the capsule-building process. Remixing as I added each item gave me outfits that I could wear, but often they weren't outfits that I really wanted to wear. I knew I had better combinations in my closet than what the process was giving me.
• Items added early get used in more outfits than items added late -- I never thought I would say this, but I am well and truly sick of looking at that Aran cardigan! Another consequence of this is that the process doesn't facilitate wearing all the items in the capsule evenly. (I realize that once the capsule is assembled you can mix the items up into new outfits -- but wouldn't it be great if the process of building the capsule gave you more of a head start at planning the outfits you wanted to wear?)

What surprised me:

It occurred to me that this process results in the creation of 40 outfits from a 16-item capsule. Do the exercise twice and you have a 32-item wardrobe and 80 outfits. That's about the number of outfits that will get you through a three-month season, and -- oh hey, that's right around the number of items featured in a lot of capsule wardrobe schemes. (I realize that those systems sometimes include shoes and/or accessories, which I haven't done here -- but not always.) So it turns out there's some theory behind those supposedly "arbitrary" item limits after all.

I have to say this was a hugely, hugely useful epiphany for me. I think a kind of "fear of scarcity" has made it difficult for me to pare down my wardrobe in the past. But here was evidence that 10 bottoms, 12 tops, and 10 sweaters would give me a different outfit every day (N.B.: One doesn't actually need to wear a different outfit every day.) for a whole season. Here was hard proof of how much is Enough.

And this insight, combined with the pluses and minuses I identified as I went through the exercise, gave me an idea about how to tweak the process to make it more useful for assembling a capsule from clothes I already own. I'll show you what I came up with in my next post.

{Update: you can read that next post right here.}

My home this season: April 2016

Here is a little planting bed -- formerly the bottom pool of a water feature that was non-functional by the time we moved in to our house -- just outside our living room sliding door. 

Almost everything in this bed is a Pacific Northwest native plant -- western meadow rue, fringecup, yellow violet, beach strawberry, columbine, TWO kinds of camas (I am inordinately proud of growing this plant!).



I don't think my husband is a huge fan of what I've done with this spot, and I admit it looks rather messy -- but that's precisely what I like about it. The way the wild plants have been allowed to grow, well, wild, and they've filled in the space with drifts and mounds of subtle flowers and delicate leaf shapes. (In fact, "what I've done with this spot" is not really accurate -- mostly, it's been the plants' doing.)



Why am I posting photos of my garden under the aegis of my monthly "what my home looks like these days" update? Well, to remind myself that our outdoor space is our home too. That's something I've been ignoring lately, to be honest. I've been frustrated by the fact that we've lived here for 11 years, and we've worked steadily on the yard every year, but it's STILL overrun with weeds and invasives, and we STILL don't have an overall landscape plan to guide us.

The truth is, our lot is substantially larger than I really want to take care of (a function of the outlying neighborhood where we could afford to buy a house). And at least one-third of it consists of rockery, slope, and parking strip that is inaccessible, difficult to maintain, and/or not really useful as a space for us to actually spend time in.

So I've just felt done with it all -- I don't want this, so I'm pretending I don't have to deal with it. It's too much work, and I don't have time.



And then I thought about something I read in one of Marie Kondo's books. (I know, I know -- go ahead and roll your eyes.)  She says you have to take care of your home, even if you're not thrilled with the home itself, because your current home leads you to your next home. To be clear, we're not planning on moving anytime soon, so we're not actually looking for our next home. But something about that admittedly woo-woo formulation seemed useful to me in dealing with the ambivalence I've always felt about the house itself. (Basically, the way I put it is -- we bought in an extremely hot market, so I knew I would have to compromise on space, style, or location, but I was kind of bummed about having to compromise on all three.)

And a week or two ago it occurred to me -- ohhhhh, that all goes for the yard, too. I realized that lately I haven't been fair to our little patch of habitat. So I'm trying to re-engage. And while this little pool doesn't quite constitute an overall landscape plan, come to think of it, it's a glimpse of what I'd like to achieve.

Eating lately: As good as they say

Here's a recent meal made up of two recipes that came highly (highly!) recommended from various quarters of the internet. Both of them, happily, lived up to the hype so I thought I would share.



First, Parmesan-roasted cauliflower. I discovered this recipe on the the delightful simple-living blog known as Assortment; it comes from Allie Lewis Clapp of Bon Appetit via Molly Wizenberg of Orangette. Everyone who writes about this dish seems to apologize for its simplicity and then shout its deliciousness from the rooftops. Consider this my addition to the genre.



(One small tweak I may make next time, though, is to steam the cauliflower by covering it with an inverted baking sheet for the first 5 minutes of cooking -- a trick I learned from the America's Test Kitchen recipe for oven fries. I think that should help the thicker parts of the cauliflower soften and cook through before the smaller morsels and onions get too far beyond the desired "just this side of burnt" stage.)



With my cauliflower -- the Romanesco version works just as well here as the common white stuff -- I served a hearty spoonful of chick peas. This dish was inspired by a recipe I pinned ages and ages ago from the blog Hungry Bruno. I liked the idea of "just chick peas," but to make things really work according to the original recipe, I think it would be necessary to cook the chick peas from scratch. Here I made do with the canned version, mashed them up partially, and simmered them for  about 20 minutes with some olive oil, a little bit of vegetable broth, and some finely chopped, spicy Mama Lil's peppers. And despite my rather loose interpretation of the recipe, this one, too, was as good as they say.

My home this season: March 2016

March came in like a lion and we made a terrarium with what it left behind.

(Wooden pysanky eggs, previously: 1 | 2 | 3 )

Finished objects: New dish towels, and a defense of downcycling

Upcycling is all the rage these days. Upcycled this and that are so omnipresent on Pinterest, Etsy, and various blogs that for a long time I wasn't even aware that the term "upcycling" was coined along with, and in opposition to, "downcycling."

Briefly, downcycling describes most recycling processes, in which discarded items are transformed into new products of lesser quality, while upcycling involves transforming trash into something better than it was to begin with.



It's hard to argue that upcycling is a good thing to strive for when it comes to industrial recycling, but in everyday life I think the idea of downcycling deserves a second look.

That's because even though it makes me sound like a crank, I have to say that quite a few "upcycled" craft projects strike me as a little bit, well, lipstick on a pig*. (It would be unkind of me to actually point out examples...but I bet you can think of some.)

Instead I think: Why not just accept that with time and use things will get downgraded to lesser purposes, without having to hide the fact that they have become stained or worn?



That is, "creative reuse" doesn't necessarily require fancying things up: Not everything needs to be a silk purse. A sow's ear is good for its purpose. A dishrag doesn't need a doily embellishment.

This is what I had in mind recently when I made some dish towels from an old tablecloth that belonged to my grandparents. It was given to them as a wedding present, so it must be almost 75 years old, can you imagine?



It's pretty threadbare -- even worn through in spots -- and not really in good enough shape to use as a tablecloth, even for a picnic.

But it's super soft and the color scheme is pretty, and I thought the fabric might have some life in it yet.

I might not have dared to do this on my own, but fortunately my mother views her mother-in-law's possessions less reverently than I view my grandmother's. >:-)>  (<--Devil smiley)




This was a very simple project: I just cut the cloth into six roughly equal sections, using the grid pattern of the fabric as a guide, and hemmed the raw edges. I thought about using this project as an opportunity to learn how to make mitered corners...but in the end I didn't bother.

I have to admit that some parts of the fabric are in worse shape than I had realized. I should probably patch some of those holes (NOT with a doily!). So this project might end up being more a meditation on wear and reuse than an actual source of new dish towels.



On the other hand, while the fabric itself may not be in much better condition than our existing kitchen linens, these towels are a lot more absorbent. I prefer them from an aesthetic perspective too, for their soft colors and uniform pattern. Perhaps most of all, I like the way these towels give me the chance to ponder the history of objects as I go about my everyday life.

-------------
*Not to be confused with "lipstick on Pig," which is what my daughter heard when she heard me say the phrase recently. Pig, of course, being the name of Ron Weasley's owl. Actually, I think "lipstick on Pig" should be a saying, too. It would mean something along the lines of "gilding the lily," but rather than indicating an attempt to improve on perfection, it would signify an attempt to prettify something for which prettification is irrelevant. So, a cross between "gilding the lily" and "like a fish needs a bicycle." So now you'll know what I mean when I use the phrase in everyday conversation, which I absolutely plan to do.

Late-winter pick-me-up

(This post contains affiliate links.)

Spring is definitely on the way, but here in Seattle the seasonal transition involves quite a bit of dithering on the part of the weather. Here are four things -- slightly random, but they all hang together for me somehow -- we have been enjoying while we wait out the frigid rain squalls.

1. Julia Rothman's Nature Anatomy (Amazon | Powell's )was an impulse purchase, of the "I'm buying this for my kid, no really" variety. In this case though I'm happy to say my daughter actually has gotten good use out of it -- in fact she read it cover to cover as if it were a novel. (There's no narrative to it, it's basically just a series of labeled illustrations of various types of animals, habitats, and landforms, with facts delivered in short captions along the way.) A nice reminder of the gorgeous things out there waiting for us when the season turns, and the gorgeous words available to us in the meantime.

2. I've set myself a goal of reading a book a month this year, inspired by this post from Wait But Why that I mentioned in the comment section of one of my posts a while back. In the post, writer Tim Urban visualizes the number of times he is likely to do various things in the amount of his life that is left to him (assuming -- knock on wood -- a 90-year lifespan). I found the bit about books especially sobering:

"I read about five books a year, so even though it feels like I’ll read an endless number of books in the future, I actually have to choose only 300 of all the books out there to read and accept that I’ll sign off for eternity without knowing what goes on in all the rest."

Even more so because since my daughter was born over 8 years ago I have only read a handful of books. I've plowed through a fair number of New Yorker articles, sure, and quite a few blog posts (of course, it goes without saying, some lovely and thoughtful ones!). But books? Seriously, maybe one per year. (I blame time confetti.) One book per month probably seems like a laughably low bar to some of you, but better to start somewhere.

February's book was The Wolf Wilder (Amazon | Powell's), a middle-grade novel about a twelve-year-old girl in late-Tsarist Russia who teaches wolves formerly kept as pets by aristocrats to be wild again, and the struggles that ensue when she and her mother run afoul of the cruel and powerful General Rakov. I recently came across a description of middle grade novels as basically poetry without the pretension -- the idea being that they often contain beautiful language and figures of speech, but you don't have to stress out about whether or not you're "getting it." The Wolf Wilder illustrates that well: "The sky was the blue of winter palaces. The snow stretched, untouched, for miles and the half-grown trees dipped like praying polar bears." You might even begin to wish that winter wouldn't end after all.

For the record, the actual middle-grader in my household also read the book, and she says she liked it, although fair warning: too many animals died for her taste. Some of these deaths occur off-page, as it were, but my kiddo is a sensitive sort; she's been known to abandon more than one book because a character said an unkind word about a cat.

3. On a different note, having exhausted my "log fire" candle, I bought a new one with the new season in mind, smelling of citrus blossoms and tropical fruits: Volcano by Capri Blue (Amazon). I have to admit that I wish it didn't smell so exactly like the inside of an Anthropologie store (mostly because I am embarrassed that I have apparently spent enough time in Anthropologie to have developed this distinct sensory association), but it's a lovely scent anyhow and a nice little sensory treat to go along with reading time.

4. Finally, a museum visit is another nice thing on a crummy weekend day.  I like the Frye Art Museum here in Seattle. It's a great place to visit with kids because it's small, the exhibits are often quirky in a way that engages kids and grownups alike, and admission and parking (in a lot directly across the street) are free, which really takes the pressure off. My daughter and I went there to see a (very abbreviated, as it turned out) exhibit of Russian paintings. I liked watching the expression on her face when I suggested that some of the paintings could be of characters from The Wolf Wilder -- half "Mom, you're so embarrassing" smirk, half delighted smile at the idea.

Leon Gaspard, "Head of a Russian boy" [...or is it Ilya?]

Ilya Repin, "Cossack girl," 1889 [...possibly Feo?] 

Though some might argue the best part of a museum visit is the cafe at the end. I don't think that's quite right, but I'm not above resorting to a little bribery....