Closets etc

A successful shopping session - everything half price, or less, at the tail end of the summer sales - had me reorganising my clothes closet, and reflecting on the process.

There are a lot of horrible garments out there - clingy knits that do worse than nothing for their wearers, for instance. But hey, it's "fashion" - and it's disposable. Cheap to buy, why even bother washing it, just throw it out - then you'll have the pleasure of shopping for more...

Well, no; not at "my age" anyway. My younger self feared middle age as the time when your choices started narrowing: you could no longer do "everything", you had to start choosing. Now, poised at the point of choice, I'm starting to see this focus as a good thing. And what came out of my closet reaffirms this.

The wisdom is that one old garment should be discarded for every garment that is newly acquired. [How old is "old", anyway? - or, even for clothing, is age just a state of mind?] The stars must have been in the right alignment: 7 garments have gone into the charity shop bag, and three have joined my artfabric stash. Less is more!

In the process everything came out of the closet and only the things I wanted to keep went back in -- much easier to do than selecting individual items to discard. From the back of the closet emerged a heap of scarves and shawls, including this one from Nepal (thanks again Margo!)

And I updated my cardfile. Having a file of cards listing your clothes may seem about as crazy as having your neckties carefully catalogued in a computer file, but everyone to their own obsession, ok? My cards fit into a small file and are sorted in several sections: clothes for "best", for work, for home and/or fun, and for in the studio; clothes almost ready to be discarded; and discards (this section is an aide-memoire and repository of sentiment). At the front is a section for clothes that need the hem taking up etc - if a garment get buried under other stuff somewhere, I'll know I wasn't dreaming that I'd bought it...

A messy little sketch of the garment goes in the middle of the card, and under it the fabric type, date acquired, and other salient info. Around the edges go messy little sketches of the things I like to wear with it.

Maybe it's the cards themselves, or maybe it's the thought process that has gone into them, but I find packing minimally isn't a problem, nor is realising what's missing from your wardrobe. Unfortunately I've discovered through doing this that I have far too many jackets (is it possible to have too many jackets, though?).