60s Glam

I love 1960s style and all things "mod" that that era produced, which is why Dear Creatures was such a great loss to the fashion world.  Dear Creatures was a 60s revival brand that very sadly went out of business in 2016.  I've been thrifting my favorite Dear Creatures pieces since that time and finally landed this lovely unicorn.  To be honest, I paid way too much for it, but I knew that was probably the only way I'd ever own it.  The last time I saw this dress listed for a reasonable price it sold within minutes.  So, I bit the bullet and paid a king's ransom for this dress.  I do love it though.  I wish all fashion design could be this good.

Outfit Info:  Dear Creatures Cecile Dress is thrifted

 

Dropped Dots

The year was 2016 and Anthropologie was a very new brand in my thrifting repetoire.  I found this Dropped Dots dress on ThredUp and purchased it for a song.  See how I styled it here for a more in-depth post with lots of pics or keep scrolling for just the highlights.  Dresses like this one made me a fast and firm devotee of Anthro pieces.  Nearly a decade later I actually swapped this dress for one that was the correct size and I love it even more now.  This dress is still in my wardrobe, just as lovely as ever and I still thrift Anthropologie because they really have been a very flattering and quality brand.

2016

2025

Outfit Info:  Dropped Dots Dress is thrifted, Shoes and bag are from SheIn

A Cherry Good Idea

Lately I have been missing out on the blogging stuff.  So many beautiful scenes all around me and I have just had to enjoy it from the car window on my daily commute.  But, when I saw this little spot in bloom with all these glorious snowy wildflowers, I turned to Mr. Bleu (sometimes we get to carpool) and said, I reeeeally want to make some time to get a few photos here this week before the flowers are gone.

Carving out time wasn't nearly as difficult as rallying myself to actually go out and do it.  Very often our free days together are spent running errands from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep.  But, on this particular day we decided to just stay home and get things done around the house.  I so enjoy the slower pace of my stay-at-home days that I never want to leave.

I'm always very productive and yet I still somehow manage to take walks and naps, cook hearty meals, and read a few chapters of whatever book is holding my interest.  It's kind of amazing when I think of the frenzy the rest of the week is, to look at these days and see a slower sort of living that actually yields more productivity and contentment.

I guess when we love what we're doing, that's plenty of motivation to do it well.  And when we feel content in one area, it leads to contentment in many others.  And when something really matters to us, we'll find both the time and the energy to make it happen.

So, I rallied myself, took off the apron, grabbed a couple of Retrolicious dresses, tried to wrangle the increasingly-wirey-as-it-grays hair into something pleasant and waded through the muck and a little poison ivy to get to this dreamy spot at sunset to capture the most beautiful wildflower garden that nature grows in my neck of the woods.  And, as much as I didn't want to leave, I'm glad I could capture this beautiful moment.

Outfit Info:  Cherry Good Vintage Dress from Retrolicious, Cherry Pie bag from Betsey Johnson.

Life With Pie

I know what you're thinking- didn't she just do a pie themed outfit? It's an old (but still true) adage that one thing leads to another and this is certainly the case wtih novelty pieces such as my Cherry Pie Bag from Betsey Johnson.  It seems that now that I have this bag, my brain is searching for other pie-themed things with which to pair it.  

After searching for some fabric to make my own dresses, I found some Cherry Pie by Gail Cadden for Timeless Treasures fabric on Etsy, and bought it.  I then remembered how Retrolicious always has fun novelty prints and stopped by there only to find a dress already made in the exact fabric I had just bought.  

Honestly, there are times when I don't mind doing the work myself so I can save some money, but sometimes I would much rather just pay someone else to do all the work for me.  This is one of those times when I would much rather pay someone else to do the work and I do love supporting smaller brands like Retrolicious.  So, I bought the cute little skater dress and I have the fabric too so I can make my own one day.

While I was at Retrolicious, I also got a cute little red plaid top, which I thought would go nicely with the dress and another little cherry dress from the same fabric collection, which I will be featuring soon.  (Gosh, times like this I really miss Fabric.com, but I guess I'll save that rant for another post.)  It goes with the bag but isn't quite as on the nose as the pie themed stuff and both these cotton dresses are perfect for summer.

Outfit Info:  Cherry Pie Dress and Red Plaid Top from Retrolicious, Cherry Pie Bag from Betsey Johnson

The 80/20 Rule

As I've whittled down my wardrobe to re-wear only the essentials, I have found myself wearing this Community Brunch Dress from ModCloth at least a couple of times per month.  It's the perfect blend of whimsical print, vintage style, and toned down colors so I wear it to work or out running errands a lot.  I've had this dress for years and it was one of the very last ModCloth purchases that I made and because of my closet overhaul, I wear it quite a lot.  Since I have so loved this new system, I thought it was high time we talked about it.  It's also high time I post pics of this dress since I realized I've had it forever and never taken a single outfit photo with it.

There is a lot of good advice out there for being conscious consumers and keeping clutter to a minimum.  In all my watching of Decluttering and Minimalist content, I have found a few nuggets of wisdom that I have been able to implement successfully into my daily life.  One of the most helpful has been the 80/20 rule.  The rule in a nutshell and as it applies to this particular blog is that most of us use 20% of our things 80% of the time.  It makes perfect sense because the human race has very little experience with accumulation of goods for much of its history.  Whether because most goods were handmade and therefore difficult to get, or because things were made of natural materials which breakdown over time much quicker than synthetics, or because most people for most of history lived in some sort of peasant status, having lots of stuff is fairly new to all of us and we really don't know what to do with it all.

In order to simplify, and have less decisions for our brains on a daily basis, we tend to gravitate toward the same things over and over and it averages out to about 20% of what we have.  Personally, I have untold hoardes of dresses and yet, when I am home doing farm or housework, I usually wear my gauze overalls with a tank or tee underneath.  They're comfortable and I don't mind getting them dirty.  It should also be noted that that sort of thing used to just be for the weekends, but now I am home more, so those items get far more wear.

Once I realized this, I whittled down my closet to just 20% of its original size in an attempt to really get the most wear out of everything.  This coincided with renovating my closet and really wanting to keep it looking organized and spacious.  And while I can honestly say that I wear everything in there much more, I have noticed that now that there's less in there, I still don't wear everything.  So, when I had 50 dresses in my closet, I probably wore 10 the most.  Now I have 15 dresses in my closet and regularly wear five on a rotation to work and three on a rotation at home.  There are about 3 others that get worn at least once or twice a month for nicer occasions.  So, of my 15 dresses, I am wearing 11 regularly; I am using a higher percentage of my clothes (nearly 75% instead of 20%, essentially flipping the ratio) even though I am wearing only slightly more by the numbers game alone.

The average number of times an article of clothing gets worn used to be 120 times per year*--clothes had a very long lifespan.  Thanks to fast fashion (and I would really like to lay the blame on cheap synthetic fabrics) clothing now usually gets worn as little as 5 times before being thrown away/donated/sold.  That's not nearly enough in my opinion, but I have noticed that after about 5 washes, most of my synthetic stuff is pilled up, scratchy, linty, and generally just ready to be thrown away.  In addition to setting this 80/20 rule for myself, I have also made a commitment to wear each item 30 times before discarding it or putting into storage.   I know some people create a spreadsheet to track the number of times they wear each piece, but I don't want to get that obsessive with this project just yet.

For the present, I am content to let 80% of my wardrobe stay in storage while I really make the most of what I have.  It's kind of a relief to not have to worry about what to wear for a while. because as much as I love my clothes, at times it was really stressful.  In fact, I developed this ritual of picking out my outfits for the whole week on Sunday afternoon.  I enjoyed that process, but it was time consuming and now I just grab the same things for work or play each time and go, and that feels like a perfect fit for my life right now.

Outfit Info:  Community Brunch Dress from ModCloth, Cardigan from YeMak, shoes from Honiara Vintage.

Statistic from *https://www.panaprium.com/blogs/i/times-clothing-worn