If you don't know what a capsule wardrobe is, let me try to explain it...
That was my problem. Through this process, I found out that I have almost 400 items in my wardrobe. 400. Granted, this includes shoes, outerwear, lounge/pajamas, workout attire and accessories. But still.
I'm proud to say that after creating my winter capsule, I got rid of/am getting rid of 45 items... Okay, maybe I'm not so proud. But I also put 75 items away to save for another season. I'll deal with them later and probably get rid of a lot of them as well.
My winter capsule has 35 items in it including shoes and outerwear. This capsule will last me at least through February. Depending on the weather, I may keep this capsule for an extra month. Once spring gets here though, I'll create a spring capsule with some roll overs from my winter one and some items from storage.
What my capsule doesn't include is lounge/pajamas, workout clothing, special occasion (fancy dresses, my Georgia jersey), bathing suites, any kind of under clothing (camisoles, tights), and accessories. I've cut down on a lot of these things. Especially accessories. But I still have way too many. I'll keep working on it.
So here's what I did to create my Winter Capsule Wardrobe...
First of all, I read a bunch of blog posts about capsule wardrobes. I really liked Caroline's blog, Un-fancy! Her entire blog is focused on her capsule wardrobes. Here's a post she wrote about tips for building one!
I used Caroline's free capsule wardrobe planner.
I filled out the lifestyle section but not really as a pie chart like she suggests. I measured out my week counting each day and each night as separate units so a week had 14 units. Then I had 4 clothing categories to assign to those units: Pajamas/workout/lounge, Really Casual, Nicer Casual, and Dressy.
For example, on Sunday during the day I'll wear a dressy outfit to church but then at night I'll wear nicer casual. On a Friday during the day I'll wear lounge while I work from home, but at night I'll wear nicer casual or dressy for date night. I wear pajamas/workout/lounge on most week days but sometimes I'll go somewhere at night and wear casual. I think you get the picture.
I also had to consider that I will be going to Georgia to work for a week in the office at least once in a season. So I took all this into consideration and decided that my wardrobe break down should look something like this:
- Pajamas/Lounge/Work out = 45% (but not counted in capsule)
- Casual = 20% (37% w/o number 1)
- Nicer Casual = 15% (27% w/o number 1)
- Dressy = 20% (36% w/o number 1)
- Pajamas/ Work out = 0%
- Casual = 34%
- Nicer Casual= 36%
- Dressy = 30%
That's not too bad I suppose.
After going through all that and deciding what kind of wardrobe my lifestyle requires, I created a list of all my clothes. I did this while I was in Georgia for work. Because I was out of town, I couldn't look in my closet to see what I had. This was good because anything I couldn't remember, didn't make it into my capsule. If I didn't remember I had it, it probably wasn't that important to me and therefore didn't need to be included.
After I created that list, I moves things around and came up with 35 items to include in my capsule. Here it is if you're interested.
Anyway, I think winter is a little harder than maybe summer because cardigans and outerwear have to go over something else which counts as two (or more) items. Also, I love sweaters and it's really hard to only keep a few in my closet. And I hate counting outerwear toward my capsule. But I gave myself 5 extra slots this season for outerwear.
Sorry if this post seems sort of all over the place, I kept thinking of more things to say about my experience. I'm loving my capsule so far and I just feel so much better having all the things that I never wore out of my closet.
Have you ever created a capsule wardrobe? How was your experience?
Thanks for reading!
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