• Cotton, wool, linen, silk, ect can all be dumped into to a compost bin. It will rot, and can be returned to the soil.
• Child care centers, or Sunday School classes who use them in crafts. They generally use all kinds of fabrics, regardless of whether they are cotton, polyester, silk, etc
• Throw them in a local clothing recycling bin, if you can find one (Salvation Army, Goodwill, Amvets, planetaid, etc.). They take anything that isn’t usable as clothing and sell it to industry for use as rags or raw fiber for other products.

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Hi. I went to a play reading last night at Solo Bar on Roy street. The group New Century Theater Company put on a play reading, and all the cute actresses showed up to watch the event in their outfits. I noticed that the trend was a little dress, above the knee, leggings and boots. Kind of like back in 1989 when I first moved here! Minus the Doc Martins. Anyway….I started hankering for this look. I have the leggings. But, no little dress. I stared to feel so bad that I didn’t have the little dress. There is a store called Queen Anne Dispatch by my shop, and on my break I went in. I tried on 8 little dresses. One of the owners was there, she knew I was on this diet. She said “won’t Sally be mad at you?” Well, I just saw Sally. She laughed and said someone in the group said I was constantly cheating. Hey, this is only four times! Yes, this is the fourth time. I got a little navy tunic by Trinity. It was on sale, too! Only $42.00. Am I the biggest cheater? Or am I the only one who confesses????

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Ok girls, and one guy.  We do have one guy now, though we are yet to hear from him on the blog.  Anyway, back to my point.  Last week I posted the poll over there to your right.  It’s sort of a trite, yes/no kind of a poll.  I was in a hurry and was getting tired of the old department store versus boutique poll and thought it was time for some poll freshen-ing up.  And the: Is it easy?or Is it hard? poll was the best I could do that day.   When I published the question I was feeling proud and sassy, as if I could go a lifetime without buying anything new.   Well today is another story.  To say “who’s idea was this anyway,” would be saying it lightly.  It’s more like who’s!@#$%^&*()_ing idea was this anyway?   You see we have had record breaking sunshine in Seattle and temperatures hovering around 58 degrees.  It’s like Mother’s Day in February which is giving me some insight into my very limited warm weather wardrobe.  What pray tell will I wear when the real mother’s day gets here?   At least in the winter you can layer a great coat over a bad outfit. Not so in warm weather.  Can you say painter’s smock?  Perhaps I’ll pick up the paintbrush again. 

So back to the poll.  Last week this diet business was easy….this week?  Un frickin’ bearable.  I want something bright, snappy and new.  The good news is…tomorrow I will likely feel differently.  Hang in there girls, and our one guy! 

Sincerly, your fearless leader

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Last night I was out with a good friend I haven’t seen in a while—it’s a schedule issue really.  My friend, she’s fabulous.  She’s married, no kids, big corporate VP job with all the accolades, notoriety and wardrobe that go along with the job.  She picked me up wearing a chic skirt, which later I learned she bought in London while on a four-city whirl wind business trip.  She had on the latest laced knee high boots and a super snappy pancho that she could pull over her head when she felt a drop of rain. 

Flash to me, older mom barely holding it together and deprived of a “new wardrobe.”  For a living?  Well, I manage to piece together a paycheck as I toggle from home to the office to school.  I am not above taking conference calls from the bedroom closet, (lest my clients detect that I am home with kids and two rambunctious cats), or writing marketing plans in the doctor’s office or from the bleachers of a baseball game.

I greet my friend at the door wearing the same jeans I have been wearing for the last 5 days (and by the way they have gotten a little baggy from the wear which somehow makes me feel thin).   Under last year’s black wrap-around sweater coat I wear a stained oatmeal colored crewneck sweater that has seen better days.   On my feet I wear my favorite pair of black Dansko clogs because everything else just hurts.  The good news is I have a fresh application of lipstick on . The bad news?  it’s  all the makeup I have on.  Upstairs, before the doorbell rang, I gave myself a cursory glance in the floor length mirror that hangs behind the closet.  I could have sworn I looked good, but once I see my friend on the doorstep it becomes painfully clear that I do not.

My friend smells good.  She has her fancy rings on her fingers and the latest watch on her wrist.  I notice her bling as I reach up to my ear and realize I forgot to put my earrings on all together. My friend says she had to “Escape from work.” In her words, “They will just have to move forward without me.”  I long to be in such hot demand from someone taller than my shoulder.  My friend told her people that she had a prior commitment and had to leave the office early.  No corporate mukety muck would understand the point of going out with a girlfriend at 5:30pm on a Monday night.  But my babysitter has a curfew and I have to be home by 10pm at the very latest.  This is standard operating procedure for me and my mommy friends who are often buzzed by 7pm and in bed by 10pm. 

When I am with my friend sans children and the big career I feel like The Great American Apparel Diet is stupid.  Like I have set myself up for frumpsville.  I feel like my career of juggling kids, a business and the occasional trip to the gym is just an excuse for a distracted and sometimes unattractive scattered existence.   What I wear is a long way down the  list of things I worry about these days, partially because I have taken up the new and brave effort to consciously consume or simply to not consume.  Seeing my friend makes me want to go to Barneys and spend like Katie Holmes.  I am moved to buy things that I know I will hate in a year, clothes that are conspicuously fashionable and expensive and well beyond my credit line.  I want clothing that says “she’s a risk taker!”   Clothes can do that you know. 

My fashionable and important, high profile friend and I  had a good time noshing on sushi and sipping saki. We skipped the movie in lieu of conversation and caramelized bananas.   I eventually forgot what I was wearing and I stopped coveting my friend’s outfit.  We discussed cancer, death and dying.  We talked about her and her husband’s effort to adopt a child, about my ever changing career and the shifting sands of the advertising business. 

After dinner my friend drove me home  just in time to relieve Rachel the babysitter (before she morphed into a winter squash). We hugged in the car and promised to get together “sooner than later.”  

Inside I chatted with Rachel and paid her in cash for watching my proidgy.  As she loaded her backpack and put on her shoes she said, “Hey, I like your sweater, where’d you get it?”   It made me laugh.  “It’s from last year…Nordstrom,” I offered, knowing that she’d never find it this year and glad that someone was coveting my wardrobe.

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I own an Etsy shop where I sell items made from recycled clothes and fabrics and often peruse the site to share with other sellers, check out what’s new and get inspiration. I was delighted that one of the guest speakers in the virtual chat one evening were the ladies from The Uniform Project. I hadn’t previously heard of the project, but I listened into the chat and was delighted to learn that it involved wearing the same plain black dress for 365 days a year. The idea was to use accesories to change the outfit; what a great inspiration!  Here is some information about the project from their website:

The Idea

Starting May 2009, I have pledged to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion. Here’s how it works: There are 7 identical dresses, one for each day of the week. Every day I will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies. Think of it as wearing a daily uniform with enough creative license to make it look like I just crawled out of the Marquis de Sade’s boudoir.

The Uniform Project is also a year-long fundraiser for the Akanksha Foundation, a grassroots movement that is revolutionizing education in India. At the end of the year, all contributions will go toward Akanksha’s School Project to fund uniforms and other educational expenses for children living in Indian slums.

So, if you are feeling a little bored and feel there is nothing to wear in your closet, take some cues from The Uniform Project, get inspired and mix it up!

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I love, love, love clothing swap’s! Fortunately for me, my friends who own the bar in my neighborhood biannually agree to open up for the ladies to conduct a “squaw swap” and what a great one we had this past Sunday. While the turnout wasn’t large, the group of ladies (about 10) had enough clothes, shoes, accesories, and housewares to really make it fun. We swapped stories of our favorite items while enjoying a glass of wine or a Guiness and poked through each other’s cast-offs.  We made goofy costumes, we were amused at another ladies delight over our silly hand-me-downs and we had a blast. Guilt-free shopping is always fun. I am in between sizes so I swapped out for a few new items in both smaller and larger sizes so I’ll be sure to have space to move up and down over the next few months. I got clothes that fit perfect, some that I can refashion or alter and some that I plan to simply cut apart for the fabric and figure it out later. My favorite find was a brown cashmere knit poncho, like an all-business snuggie; I love it. I also found a beautiful Banana Republic blazer, sweaters galore and an awesome cowgirl shirt.  It was fun, it was refreshing and I can’t wait to do it again!  If you live in the Baltimore City area and are intersted in future clothing swaps, you can follow my personal blog or twitter feed for updates, or sign up for the Parkside’s newsletter where they’ll send you emails of their upcoming events, including clothing swaps. The more ladies we get, the more choices we’ll have so bring your used clothes and get ready to have have a liberating, guilt-free, swapping party!

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Here I am, joined last week…and I have to admit, I had to make my last goodbye shopping last week. I feel like starting with real diet, and eating a big cake the night before  But that was really final! I will not anymore support financial crisis overcoming (because some smart economists told that if we buy more, we will overcome financial crisis faster). So goodbye shinny windows, nice clothes, and discouuuunts. Will update you how it goes! And if I am surviving

Btw, any proposal what we can do with the money we save from shopping! Maybe we can organize some trip in August

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I bet every single one of us has at least one item in our closet that we know we won’t wear again but keep around for one important reason or another.  (See “Taking back the green dress“)  Such was the case for an orange wool jacket that my husband had given me that I had put in the wash and shrunk. Aagh! Bad stupid wife! I could still wear it but the snaps in front were straining, making me look chunky. So there it sat in the closet untouched, for the very important reason that my husband had given it to me—plus, I like it. I went to the fabric store last weekend and what do you know, they had two buttons for $1.40 that matched the jacket color perfectly. A couple hours, some thread and brown elastic later, and voila, I have a new fastener in the front and a jacket that fits perfectly and looks good too I think. Here’s the before and after pics. I’m so glad to have it back!

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My initial inclination was to avoid temptation altogether- stay away from my favorite boutiques, un-bookmark all my favorite online stores, and keep a good 5 miles between me and any given mall. Good old-fashioned avoidance would surely work. But inevitably I had to end up in or near a store at some point. That point in time arrived all too soon last week. My best friend had an audition for an acting role as a 70s cheerleader and needed help pulling something together. Being her best friend and a stylist made me the obvious person to turn to for help, even though I’d never technically spent a day in the 70s. ‘How bad could a vintage shop be?’ I thought. ‘Surely they won’t be able to tempt me with their disco-era moth-eaten polyester.’ How bad you ask? Very, very bad.

Turns out even second-hand isn’t so bad when you’re in a self-imposed anti-shopping hell. (Looking back, the phrase ‘any port in a storm’ comes to mind.) I tried on three fur coats and clutched a patchwork handbag against my body as if my heart would literally stop if I lost my grip. In the end I loosened my death grip and walked away without any purchases, but not without seriously reconsidering my vow of shopping celibacy. The good news is I now know where to get a great fur coat in September and that I was knocked off my ivory designer tower and shown the potential of second-hand shops. The bad news is that literally nowhere is safe.

Eff. This little endeavor might be more difficult than I’d anticipated.

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In an effort to stay on track and avert the pangs that I feel every time I receive an email notification of some crazy sale, clearance or closeout I have made an effort to unsubscribe to each an every email fitting that bill this week.  I hadn’t reailized how many times a day I was bombarded with these messages to “Buy Now!”, but I know that as I receive fewer of these emails I am beginning to feel better already.  Instead, I’ve subscribed to some refashion blogs and newsletters as well as some fashion/couture websites. This helps me to feel like I’m still in the loop, but forces me to think about how I can rework what I already have in my closet instead of rushing to buy something online. My favorite is the daily dose of fashion voyeurism that I get from “The Cut: New York Magazine’s Fashion Blog”. I still get my fill of fashion goodness and its almost as good as dark chocolate.

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