Monday, November 23, 2015

Wardrobe Stash Cleansing - the Plan

Since ranting about wanting to pare down my wardrobe to a sustainable level a few days ago, I decided to set a self-challenge: to cleanse something from my wardrobe stash every week between now and the end of the year. To accomplish this challenge, I need to put a plan in place.

First, I will deal with just the Fall/Winter garments and accessories. I will lay out all the wintry items, photograph them, and wear different items each day for the next month to test their wear-ability. I will then evaluate each items in with the following questions:
  1. Does it fit?
  2. Is it comfortable?
  3. Is it warm?
  4. Is it practical for day to day purpose (e.g. driving, grocery shopping, taking care of young children, running after children, carrying heavy loads, cooking, etc)?
  5. Is it beautiful?
  6. Does it have great sentimental value (e.g. given to me by a special person, me-made items that took lots of sweat and tears, etc)?
I think I'll probably falter at the last question regarding sentimentality since most of my wardrobe consists of me-made items. Perhaps I will end up purging all the store purchased stuff from my wardrobe once and for all! LOL!

Also, once I have catalogued all the items in the wardrobe, I will be shocked at the actual volume and be shamed into purging at least some of them.

I have called a couple of local charity shops and sadly they have confirmed that they would sometimes throw away donated items that didn't have tags on them. They said that the tagged items (especially the known brands like H&M, Gap, Zara, TopShop, etc) were the ones that sell well whereas the custom made stuff (no tags) stayed on the racks forever. So they would rather not receive them. How sad! I will need to find a good home for them somehow if I do decide to purge them.

2 comments:

  1. A good plan; good luck!

    That's unfortunate about the charity shops. I think someone else mentioned women's organizations (Dress for Success, maybe? or something similar) who take clothing suitable for office wear for women with fewer resources who are training to go back to work ... some churches also take donations for local or international use (St. Vincent de Paul, Salvation Army). The ideal solution would be to find someone your size who wants beautiful hand-made garments and can't sew herself! (I just googled St VdeP and in the Toronto area at least, they welcome "any and all!" clothing and coats.) Maybe you could think about keeping more than you originally intended, too; maybe you just need an additional storage solution and a system for rotating everything. If they bring you joy ...

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    1. Thanks Jenny! I will definitely check out St Vincent de Paul. I also think that some of the me-made or me-refashioned stuff NEED to be re-refashioned for myself or the kids. This way I can continue to 'create' things without taking up even more wardrobe space!

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