Dress for Success
I wish I had a ton of exciting things to share, but I don’t. Other than working constantly and dealing with an extended bout of pertussis (I’m so hip, even my diseases are retro) and the resulting broken rib, I haven’t had much going on.
I did, however, do two, nay three, things that I’m quite proud of.
Now that I’m in a leadership position of my own company, I have to dress like I own a company. To that end, I needed a total closet overhaul. So first, I took everything out of my closet and spread it all out, including my shoes and accessories, then I started building outfits from head to toe. I kept Tim Gunn on the TV for emotional support.
The first thing that I noticed by having all of my shoes all over the place was that I only have black and gray shoes. No nude or brown or anything. So I added that to my “buy” list. Once I had put all of the outfits together (and tried them on in front of a full length mirror) about half of my clothes were gone but I had added several items to my “buy” list that I needed. I realized that i have no special occasion top or belt, again something I just didn’t realize because I had no clear idea of what was really in my closet until I tried to put it all together. I also had ideas for many more outfits than I thought I had simply by putting things with each other into a full outfit.
The end result was a clean closet of clothes that I knew worked with each other. Everything is easy to find now because all the junk and clutter is gone.
Part two of Dress for Success came when I had to decide what to do with my favorite jeans. I love these jeans and I had already donated my other favorites because they’re too big now. So since my current faves were too faded to wear, I decided to dye them blue again.
I’m not really that great at following directions. I’m good at reading them (sometimes) but more often than not, I just sort of wing it and hope for the best. I started with the jeans. Within moments I had blue dye all over the kitchen, running down the cabinets, pooling on the floor. I was frantically trying to clean up the dye and simultaneously stir my pants. When it came time to rinse, I realized that I had forgotten to buy gloves and I didn’t have any around the house. So, I winged it – because I had already put this project off for weeks. I dyed my hands navy blue.
For the second part, I dyed a pair of faded black cargo pants. They came out perfect and instead of dyeing my hands black, I put them in two trash bags and used that when rinsing the pants. The jeans came out BLUE, like a new pair of 501s from back in the day. The wash looks a bit unique but they came out nice. I’ll have to see once it starts to fade again, how the dye looks.
Lastly, for my final piece of the closet project, I took my 2 pairs of brand new jeans and 2 new dress shirts to a tailor and had everything fitted. Wow, what a difference! I always have to buy large shirts and even those don’t always fit because of my large chest. Because I have a smaller waist and a huge rack, my shirts look like tents. Now with tailoring, I don’t need to look like I’m wearing a muumuu.
I have to run now but I do have a rant about vitamin aisles so I will be back…






