Read the rest here. Or just subscribe already and you'd have it in your email inbox!I don’t have any grain, myself. But you know what I do have? Baby clothes. Washed and folded, sorted by size and separated into bins. I installed built-ins in the guest room closet to fit all the little seasons and sizes.All so I could rest easy knowing that I had enough tiny sneakers and sweater vests to last me a lifetime.Now, fortunately for all the little sneaker-wearing people who live in this house, my life has not yet been required of me. But, nor have I required all that stuff I so carefully hoarded for so many years.
I wrote that post over a month ago, and in the weeks since then, it seems like I can't swing a bag of cats without bumping into another capsule wardrobe post on the internet.
The first I heard of it as a concept with a name was on this blog and I was smitten. She's just the cutest. But I guess this is where it all started?
In any case, I can't get it out of my head. For years now, I've felt uneasy about all the all the all the clothes in this house. There's this tug between wanting to use things for multiple children, and wanting to keep stuff for myself, just in case I need it . . . and, on the other side, feeling like I'm slowly drowning in stuff that other people could be using.
I wrote this post about how we pack for the kids, and ever since have secretly known that if my kids can get by on that amount of clothing for two weeks, then there is absolutely no reason they couldn't get by on it for three months. Or more in Southern California. My boys really only need pants for church and January.
Then I wrote this post giving us all permission to get rid of stuff that's cluttering up our homes, and ever since I've known that I could stand to do a better job of following my own advice.
Because the more I think about the concept of a small, seasonally appropriate wardrobe being the only thing in my closet the more I see it as not just a way to declutter and do less shopping, but as a step in the right direction in my Christian life.
We are called to be detached from our possessions. We are called to be "poor in spirit." That doesn't mean being unhappy. It means living a spirit of poverty, treating the things I own as not belonging to me, just as things I'm looking after, because everything belongs to God.
St. Basil says, “The coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. . . . Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.”
These closets stuffed with clothes that I might need sometime are a symptom of attachment, and of a lack of trust in God's providence. I have a vision of myself having to get all these clothes burned off of me, slowly, layer by layer in Purgatory. Am I being overly dramatic here? Perhaps.
But I'm thinking NOW is the time to pull the trigger on this thing. It's finally started to cool down here in Los Angeles. So tomorrow, a terribly stylish friend is coming over to help me actually DO IT and not chicken out.
We'll see what ends up happening, but my plan is to create a fall/nursing capsule wardrobe to put in my closet now, that will last me until at least advent. I'll also choose pieces I like out of my existing wardrobe to create capsules for other seasons, and because I'm still in THIS part of my life, I'll need to create 1-2 maternity capsules, plus a postpartum, and maybe a not-pregnant/not-nursing one too. Then everything else goes. Out, out, out. (And then on to the kids?)
I'll be posting photos of the process and my picks, so stay tuned.
Now. Who's with me?! Who has done this and can offer me advice and encouragement? Who keeps hearing about capsule wardrobes and wants to give it a try with me? Who keeps hearing about capsule wardrobes and just wants it to stop?
Do you have a blog post about capsule wardrobes we should see? Link it up!