13 November 2015

Color Palette for my wardrobe

I have been fiddling with the colors I've been choosing and if you look at all the seasons together you can see the progression of it. In the fall I didn't put up pictures of my clothing, but I went with navy, black, red , blue and white.

I have quite a few black clothes, but they don't do much for my skin. They make me look really pale and washed out. So, I haven't been wearing them as much. I took all the pinks out of my fall wardrobe, but near the end I went and got a pink shirt to wear. I really missed it. So, I put it back in. Since it's not an exercise in deprivation I wanted to figure out how to keep the pink/mint combo with the red/navy combo all while extracting the black. Apparently, this is not a "fashionable" combination and I couldn't find anything on the inter webs about these colors in a wardrobe together.



The colors at the bottom are the neutrals, the ones to the right side are my accents and the 3 largest ones are my main colors. I'm planning on this palette being my colors for quite awhile, since I love all of them and it creates several different options.
I already have quite a bit of navy clothing. I have been buying it and not realizing it for years...
I am still trying to go through all of my clothes. I did a large purge last year when I started this endeavor and I've been going through the rest slower because those are ones that I like more and did wear quite a bit. I now challenge myself to get rid of 5-10 pieces when I go in there. I have all these clothes hanging up in my spare bedroom and I'd like to use that at a nursery soon and not have it be full of clothing that I'm not wearing! 
I need to get in there and get rid of some more things! 
For now, I know which things can go by looking at whether or not they fit in my palette and then whether or not I love wearing them. 

Do you have a color palette that you stick to in your closet? I find it helps me know what I need when I'm shopping for that next season or to fill holes in my wardrobe. 



09 November 2015

'Age of Adeline' Wine Velvet Dress

I've scoured the internet to see if anyone has ever tried to recreate the wine velvet dress that Adeline wears to the new years parties. I did not find anything. It's such a beautiful dress. It has a beautiful, yet classic style. The cut out in the back was actually fairly popular in the mid to late 1940's. You need to have some kind of support inside the bodice to make the cutout AND the low neckline. It's sexy, but not overly flashy.

Now, if you haven't seen the movie yet..you really should. It is simply amazing. The plot is awesome and the way the shot the movie actually gives it the period feel for each decade that they show you.  It's no 'New Amsterdam', but it's a close second. That will always be my favorite plot. I long to see it done again, and actually finished.


And I'm even going to give myself a deadline for this dress. I want to make it in time to take it with me on a cruise I'm going on with my DH. In February. It's the beginning of November now, that gives me basically 2 months to complete it. I have a lot of work to do still. And then I need to think about how I'm going to do the beading. Am I going to do that by hand? Or can I find a strip that I can tack down on the dress?


Now to convince you of the beauty of this dress.
This is just the best picture available of the dress. She's a beautiful girl as well. 



This picture shows the actual color of the dress. In the movie, the way it was shot it looked black to me until I watched the special features. Knowing that it's red just made me love it all the more. 

See what I mean here? It looks a little black, no?

This dress is classic. My favorite word to describe clothing. 

And here is a shot of the back. The cutout makes construction a bit harder... 
But, I'll get into that next time. 
Let me know which of her costumes was your favorite. 

Happy Sewing!!


06 November 2015

Why I didn't post in October...

This month DH and I have been working on the house. Of course ive been canning and I put that up on my facebook page for the blog. If you want to see more pictures go on over there.

But. Our livingroom carpets were gross when we moved in and with 4 pets they kust got worse. We had planned to replace it, and we have been saving money to do it. Im not going to tell you how much we spent on this project, but it was a lot. And we did all the labor. I can't imagine what this would have cost us to have someone come in and do it!

And of course i have some pictures for you! 
I took pictures of the room/areas before i started the job. 
Yuck right??
I forgot to get a before picture here. But you can see how bad the carpets were i. The others. This is the largest part of the room. 

All nasty carpets took me most of the day to rip out. Then there was all the sand and dirt underneath it!! Then i had staples and tack strips to remove too. 
Me and declutter dog were up to the task at hand! We filled this bucket 4 times with tack strips, room dividers, and staples. Oh my word! If i have to pull another staple in my life it will be too soon!!


So after everything was removed it looked much better.
The natives were getting restless though. 
We decided to replace part of the sub floor, due to some damage. (Dont do it if you dont have to folks! This was a lot of work!!) we swept and swept and swept again. 

Then it was time to lay the underlayment down. Oh look im going the wrong way! 
So we had to move it and cut it to fit and then move the wood as we went too. 
(Not light!)
Finally we got that going the right way. 
And we're ready to lay the wood down. (That piece is just holding the underlayment down for now.