A bit of perspective

At the risk of exposing my deep seated mental illness too all my readers, I thought I'd write something about one of my 'stop buying dresses' techniques. I haven't done this for ages (which is probably why I have no money and too many dresses!) so today I started up a new note book.

I've been stuck at home with a bad back and the temptation to look at clothes online is almost overwhelming. The problem with having better choices (i.e more than just Evans) and more reasonably priced plus sized clothing these days means that there is ALWAYS something I want. 5 years ago I only saw clothing that I REALLY wanted maybe once a month, but now... I always have a wish list. Last year was an expensive one what with moving and my first beach holiday in 5 years etc, and my clothes addiction did not help the old bank balance, so today I have been taking stock! The picture above is my dress wardrobe. Ridiculous isn't it?!

So to stop my from buying, I sketch all of my dresses. You may think I'm bonkers, but it actually really helps. I do this for lots of reasons...

For one thing it takes up time I would be using to drool over dresses online. I do genuinely look at them sometimes to help me decide what to wear, because staring at so many options in the wardrobe can sometimes make getting dressed much more difficult than it needs to be. It also really draws my attention to how obscene my dress collection is, and therefore shames me into taking a bit of a dress buying break! I currently have 79 dresses in this wardrobe.... but thats not even all of them, I also have a little suitcase full of super summery dresses that I packed away at the beginging of winter. I have of course filled every gap in the wardrobe with NEW dresses since then, but selling shit loads of stuff is helping ease the situation. The size of my collection wouldn't really matter if I were rich, or if I had a huge home with walk in wardrobes etc, but I'm not, so i must curb!

Curbing is hard, but purging isn't - this is one of my old note books, and the dresses that are scribbled out are ones I've sold or given to charity. I use these crappy little sketches to think about what I have and haven't worn / what I do / don't like etc. I've got so much to sell at the moment (thanks to you guys who have helped my cause by buying from my blog shop btw!) and I've also got loads of stuff to give away. I don't actually know any women my size to give clothes away to, and annoyingly I don't have a cancer research shop near me these days (my charity of choice) so without a car it's become tricky to actually donate anything to charity.... might have to investigate their website to see if they do collections in my neck of the woods. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was a charity shop in London that specialised in plus sizes?! One can dream....

Anyway, I find my insane note books really helpful. In fact it has left me with the desire to have a mini wardrobe spring clean, which is what I'm about to do!