Lazy wardrobe evaluation

For various reasons, work among them, I haven't been getting all that much sewing done. But the weather has recently changed, leading me to think about wardrobe planning. Now, there's no shortage of resources about this. Many of them take the "haul everything out and have a big think" approach. Nothing wrong with that, I do it sometimes, and probably anyone who's set out to find articles or books on the topic is contemplating doing something drastic anyway. But of course, it can't be done every day.

Day-to-day, the way I usually organize my closets is a rotational system. I doubt I'm the first one to think of it: Whenever something has been worn/comes out of the wash, I put it back at one end of the closet. I try to make my next choice of what to wear from the opposite end, or close to it. If anything really backs up there, that means it's being passed over repeatedly, and maybe I need to do something about that.

Other places, you'll commonly see questions about whether the item fits, needs some sort of repair/is beyond repair, is too outdated, etc. I'll skip over those and go to a few other, perhaps subtler problems I've seen with my own stuff.

• It's the wrong level of formality for what I usually wear. In that case, I might move it to either my "formalwear" or "lounge/workout wear" section, if it fits in there and I intend to keep it. (I use the same rotational system for those sub-areas, but I'm a little less ruthless with the formalwear because I'm not a socialite… though in view of that, I probably do need to stop sewing so much formalwear and costumes. Moving right along….)
• I don't mix patterns fearlessly, so printed and even some tone-on-tone separates can be hard to pair up. That usually means I need a higher ratio of solids to prints for that season.
• Some tops need a skin-tone bra, which I think are kinda ugly/boring, so I often don't have a lot of them. When that issue comes up, it means I need to bite the bullet and either buy more of those bras, or get rid of some of those tops.
• Short tops and low-waisted bottoms don't play nicely. This can mean getting stricter about the lengths/waist positions of things I buy/make/keep, or making sure I have quite a few longer tops and/or higher-waisted bottoms. (I think really high-waisted pants are problematic—harder to fit, and since I've got a long rise, they can be unflattering unless they're quite loose—so I tend to prefer skirts for the latter case.)
• The color doesn't match the palette I'm trying to work toward, and therefore most of my other clothes and accessories. There isn't a lot I can do about this, since I'm not willing to dye things, so I'm gradually phasing those things out. It does mean I rarely buy fabric online anymore, unless it's a site that gives out Pantone numbers, thread color numbers, or swatches. (I could write a lot more on that whole topic, but at the moment I'm working toward something of a Soft Summer/Carol Tuttle Type 2 palette.)

All of this lets me collect data over time, which puts me in a better position when I'm ready to do the "big think". I tend to make final decisions on what to get rid of a few times a year, when I switch things around to put the seasonally-appropriate ones in the most convenient closet. I'm trying to get a bit more systematic about that too; more on that later.

Bra-makers Supply colorways

This is not related to anything I'm currently working on, but I've been meaning to write it up for a while.

Bra-makers Supply is a (the?) Canadian online vendor of lingerie supplies. I've yet to buy any large amount from them, but one of their main features is they have certain colors for which they sell matching fabrics, elastics, and notions.

This addresses a major problem with home sewing in general: we usually don't have our notions dyed to match; we just have to choose from whatever standardized, or miscellaneous, colors someone has decided to manufacture. This is an even worse problem with bras, because they have so many components made of different materials. It's easy to get stuck with near-miss color matches, plain black or white, or contrasting colors when you'd rather use only one.

Here is Bra-makers' Duoplex swatch set:

Duoplex is one of their nonstretch fabrics that you'd use for cups. They do swatch sets for other fabrics too; I just got this one because it had the widest range of colors available. (Unfortunately, this is photographed in artificial light, and the brightness and clarity of most of the colors doesn't come across.)

Keep in mind, the range of colors for which elastic and closures are available, at time of writing anyway, is much more limited: pink, a couple beige shades, dark brown, ivory, white, red, and black, and I think just recently they've added fuchsia and turquoise. I personally am not a big fan of all the brights and clear pastels, and wish they'd do more of the muted or dark colors (they've got a dark plum, dark green, two grays, and two sorts of navy, but no matching notions for them). Still, being able to get color-matched, more-or-less continuously available fabric and notions at all is a big deal.

Anyway, the other nice thing Bra-makers does is list Pantone numbers, at least for their standard fabrics and elastics (not so much for their laces). If you have the Fashion & Home deck, although matching fabric to paper is not ideal, you can look those up. And while I think they've tried their best to match colors to numbers, in some cases the Pantone deck just doesn't have a great match.

Here the Pink is a decent match for the Pantone color they chose (right below it). The Mid-tone Grey, not so much: the fabric definitely has more of a red-violet cast. But looking through the deck, I could see that was arguably the best match available. The White is a real optic white that is brighter than anything in the deck, though newer decks may have a better match than older ones, as they can yellow or dull with age. Anyway, my point is: this is good enough to get a general idea, but if you're going to try to match anything to Bra-makers' colors, and you're as picky about it as I am, you're best off getting a swatch set. The other advantage is it's much lighter and easier to carry around.

One of these days I want to write up a big comparison of several lingerie supply vendors. Generally speaking, I would say Bra-makers is good for relatively unadorned bras, and they consider a big range of sizes. In comparison, some of the European vendors have much prettier lace, but none of them do the custom-dye thing as far as I know, and their fabrics may need some backing to be supportive enough for the larger sizes. More on all this later.