A Domino Effect

Now that the New Year is wholeheartedly upon us it seems like the perfect time to carry on with the capsule wardrobing series.  I know I’ve been doing some New Year’s decluttering and tidying up of my own closet, and I suspect I’m not alone.  Here at stage 2 (stage 1 is here in case you want to re-read it) I’m going to write about putting your capsule wardrobe together.

As I said back at Stage 1, the essence of the capsule wardrobe is versatility, rather than minimalism.  You can have a wardrobe with lots of different things in it and still legitimately call it a capsule.  The point is that whatever you put in there is wearable, useful and wanted.  So regardless of the amount of clothing you have in your wardrobe, the following principles should be remembered as you think about putting it together:

Make sure you can see things

Structure your wardrobe in such a way that everything in it is both visible and accessible: stuffing clothes into drawers is a brilliant way to forget all about them.  And really, who has the time to go burying through the wilderness for a black roll-neck on a frosty Winter’s morning?  Your wardrobe should work for YOU, not the other way round.  But it can only do that if you put it together in a logical way.  And how you do that depends on your own preferences, and also the wardrobe you have.

I have very limited space to hang things in my wardrobe, so I reserve that for dresses, skirts, trousers and a few tops I don’t want to crease.  The rest of my clothes are folded and laid on shelves organised by style (basic tops, hoodies, cardigans etc) so I know exactly where to look for things.  Coats and jackets I hang on hooks by the door, shoes and accessories I display.  A wire coat hanger makes a good scarf house if you hang it somewhere prominent, and draping necklaces over the corner of mirrors always allows you to find one at a glance.  If that sounds like cluttersville to you, think about storage options.  Clear boxes or chintzy wicker baskets will hold lots of items, and pretty jam jars are one of the most useful storage solutions around: imagine a row of those cute Bonne Maman ones filled with lovely bits of jewellery.

Create an even spread

Your capsule wardrobe should serve all of your needs.  If you have a surplus of strapless dresses but a dearth of long-sleeved tops to layer underneath them in Winter, then a good percentage of your wardrobe is unwearable when it’s cold.  Impractical, and probably pretty frustrating as well (nothing brightens up a dull January day like a summer floral!).  Similarly, if you are bereft of snow-repelling footwear, the next bout of white stuff will leave you feeling miserable and with wet feet, as opposed to gleeful, childish and desperate to make a snowman.

If you made a list at Stage 1 of the things you think your wardrobe is lacking, now’s the time to pick those items up.  I’ll write a little about shopping later at Stage 3, but some sage advice right now is to make a list, stick to it and leave the high street once you’re done.  You’re on a capsule wardrobing mission girl, not a jolly jaunt around town.  Stick to the plan and don’t open your purse unless it’s for something on your list.

Give it some love

That means hand washing and dry cleaning where necessary (note: not just bunging stuff in the machine in the hope that it’ll all be fine), paying attention to water temperatures on labels and always using a fabric softener.  It also means ironing, folding and putting away – three things I fail at with surprising regularity.

I HATE ironing.  No other household chore feels like such a spectacular waste of time.  So I’ve got two options: buy and wear only clothes that don’t need to be ironed, or man up and get on with it.  And seeing as I have neither the pennies nor the inclination to replace my entire wardrobe with iron-free garments (some day!), it’s the latter approach that I take.  The best tip I can offer to any fellow iron haters is to get some of your favourite music on, find your way to ‘the zone’ and stubbornly focus on the image of a wardrobe full of ready-to-wear, crisply ironed clothes.  It works people, really it does.

Repair things

Having to change your outfit plan because the burst seam on your ‘feel fantastic’ shirt mysteriously hasn’t been repaired by sparkling little elves in the middle of the night is annoying.  As is having to wear your second-choice shoes because you forgot to polish up your favourites.  Repairs such as these really are necessary if you want your wardrobe to function at its peak.  The best strategy I’ve found for overcoming the tedium of sewing on buttons and picking up dropped hems is to do them in front of the telly with a glass of wine by your side (just one – being drunk when there are pins and needles involved isn’t something I’d heartily recommend).

Monitor

Finally, try to get into the habit of monitoring your wardrobe.  Having one superbly energetic bout of organising at the beginning of the year is great, but if you don’t keep it up your wardrobe will soon revert to its old disorderly ways.  Having a weekly or fortnightly sprucing up session will allow you to stay in control.  It will also alert you to those things you’re simply not wearing (you know, the ones to whom you gave a second chance at stage 1?).  Maybe they don’t fit anymore.  If so, toss them.  Life’s too short to be bullied by a pair of jeans.  Or maybe they do fit but just look a little tired.  If that’s the case, consider customising them by dyeing, swapping the buttons or adding a trim.  As I said before, there’s a whole world of possibilities out there when it comes to alterations.  Get your thinking cap on and do something creative.

So there you have it: stage 2 done and dusted, and a gleaming, fully functional capsule wardrobe the result.  Join me later on for Stage 3: A word on shopping.

Image above from Flickr – funkypancake.

I’ve decreed this Boxing Day my own personal day of slovenliness.  Pyjama-clad and with a box of chocolates within easy reach, it’s safe to say I harbour absolutely no intentions of going outside today.  My family are gathered infront of a film in the next room, the cat is curled up on the sofa behind me and I’m basking in that lovely feeling of post-Christmas warmth, the kind that naturally follows a day of relaxation, laughter and nice food.

You can imagine, therefore, my despair when I logged onto the BBC news website to find this story earlier on.  That’s right, shoppers were “screaming with relief” when they were finally permitted to enter the hallowed halls of their favoured money-sucking meccas this morning.  Apparently those pesky Sunday trading laws were keeping agitated spenders from their bounty, leaving them foaming at the mouth and stamping their feet outside in the cold until the unthinkable hour of 11am.  I can imagine the outrage: how DARE the day of rest get in the way of the best binge of the year?  Surely some MP somewhere must resign at the alter of consumer capitalism for such an atrocity?  No?  Ah well, back to the tills then.

The sarcasm is, perhaps, a touch unnecessary.  The question, however, I think is pretty clear…

What are we doing to ourselves?

Why oh why do we so stoutly refuse to say no to shopping?  Why is it that a mature, well-developed and relatively well-educated society such as ours has decided to enslave itself to ‘things’ to the extent that we have?  I know I had this rant at roughly the same time last year, but I still don’t get it.  I still don’t get why people would actively choose to go out and spend yet more money when they’ve only just finished bankrupting themselves over Christmas.  It’s absurd to the point of extremity that some people are still shopping, when they know fine and well that they will spend the whole of 2011 struggling to pay off the debts they’ve incurred over the past three or four weeks alone.  And what’s all this spending for?  For a bunch of consumer chattels with a limited lifespan and absolutely no power to bring joy, that’s what.  It’s madness.

I’m fully aware that this year the unhappy prospect of a 2.5% VAT increase looms over us, and that in a purely practical sense it is much wiser to make necessary purchases this side of January 4th than the other.  Nevertheless, I can’t for one second believe that astute tax planning is what’s motivating a sizeable proportion of the masses at the shops today.  What’s motivating many people, I would conjecture, is the desire for more.  More clothes, more DVDs, more electronic gadgets.  Forget about the stuff we received in our stockings yesterday, today is a bright new dawn of half-off consumer spending – make the most of it!

It’s honestly not my intention to sound all preachy and holier than thou, so if I do, I sincerely apologise.  I fully accept that we are fortunate enough to live in a society where people are, by and large, free to do what they like.  There’s no law against shopping, and neither do I think there should be.  It simply depresses me to think of all the money that’s being wasted as I sit here and write this: pounds being poured down the throats of people like Philip Green, the gap between our country’s rich and poor haemorrhaging with every transaction and all because we can’t keep a lid on our desire for material wealth.  It upsets me to think of all the Christmas presents, unwrapped with frenzied haste a mere 24 hours ago, but already consigned to the far corners of minds as their recipients race to the tills in search of the ever-elusive more.

But what upsets me most about the Boxing day shopping bonanza is the fact that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world who don’t even have enough to eat, let alone enough to fuel the festival of excess that has become the great British Christmas.  The fatal twist of the knife, and the thing that is so profoundly abhorrent about the entire charade, is the fact that for some people in this country, even Christmas isn’t enough.

Image above from Flickr – gagilas.

Regular readers to this blog will surely know by now that I’m a pretty big fan of charity shopping.  I absolutely love it.  And it’s the process I love – those countless hours of rummaging through rails, boxes and baskets of other peoples’ discarded items – as opposed to the buying.  It bothers me not at all that on at least half of the occasions on which I step over the threshold of a charity shop I leave without buying anything.  To me, the fun is in spending time immersed in marvelling at other peoples’ junk  – whatever that says about me.  And generally, whenever I do find something I actually want to buy, I’m happy to part with the cash on the basis that I consider what I’m buying to be worth the money I’m paying for it and also because that money is going towards supporting a charity, which in my book is pretty great.

Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably in a society where moaning about absolutely everything – even good things (trust me, a hardcore moaner will find a way) – is the norm, not everyone shares my mindset and lately I’ve heard lots of negative mutterings, both online and while eavesdropping in charity shops themselves, about the prices of second-hand stock.  This irritates the absolute hell out of me, for a plethora of different reasons. Firstly, there’s the biggie: charity shops aren’t like other shops.  They exist in order to raise much-needed funds for astoundingly valuable causes, not to make vast profits which will eventually line the pockets of someone like Phillip Green who, let’s be honest, neither needs nor deserves a single penny more of our hard-earned cash.  Money raised in charity shops goes towards really helping people who so desperately need support, care and generosity, so to begrudge Shelter an extra few pounds for a pair of good quality second-hand shoes really does sound rather ignorant.

And then there’s the second-hand thing.  It amazes me that some people still ascribe to the expectation that simply because an item of clothing, a piece of crockery or a book has had at least one previous owner, it should automatically be sold in a charity shop for peanuts.  This, to me, is bonkers.  Good quality clothing remains good quality clothing regardless of how many closets it has seen, and while of course a discount can be expected in lieu of the fact that something is being bought second (or third, or fourth…) hand, isn’t it a little churlish to insist that those boots that have never been worn should be sold for two pounds rather than fifteen?  The expectation that stock should be cheap is a hark-back to the days when charity shops were little more than dingy dumping grounds for tattered, moth-eaten garments that really were practically worthless. That, however, is most definitely no longer the case.  Charity shops today are chocked to the rafters with stock that was available new on the high street only months ago, and the rise in prices, I think, owes more to the fact that our throwaway consumer culture and ‘wear once’ mentality results in people donating things to charity that they bought only five minutes ago but have already replaced with the latest fad than it does to charities being unreasonable.  The charity shops of 2010 are vibrant, modern, cool places to hang out, filled with contemporary and totally desirable stock.  And to me, complaining about the prices shows little other than a distinct lack of regard for the fact that charity shops have most definitely moved with the times.

And neither should we forget that charity shops aren’t an island.  Aside from some tax benefits and the fact that the vast majority of their stock is donated by the public as opposed to bought from a supplier, they are dealing with exactly the same kinds of economic pressure as the rest of us.  Stores have rent to pay (and where a shop is situated in a salubrious area you can bet your ass that that doesn’t come cheap) as well as other overheads such as gas, electricity and the wages of full-time staff.  No one needs to be reminded that utilities prices are high at the moment, and if a charity shop is expected to sell jumpers for only 50p a piece, how many would it need to shed before it could afford a supply of heating at Winter 2010 rates?  My guess is into the thousands, which doesn’t sound realistic if anything is to be left over for the actual charity, does it?

The other thing (and I promise I’ll cease to rant soon) that I think is important when it comes to charity shop prices is the market.  If an article of clothing is genuinely worth a bit of money on the second-hand market, I see no reason whatsoever why the charity shouldn’t be entitled to have a bash at scoring big for its cause.  If a pair of boots would sell for £30 on eBay there’s absolutely no reason in my opinion why a charity should close its eyes to that and insist upon selling them for a fiver.  My local Shelter emporium is currently selling a gorgeous, and very new-looking, woollen coat by Max Mara for £40.  A quick survey of eBay shows that similar coats are selling for around the same price – much more in some cases, and I therefore think that Shelter are absolutely justified in their pricing decision.  They may be charity shops, but they need not be doormats, and if there’s a chance that an item will bring in a healthy donation to the cause in question, I think that pricing competitively is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.  The alternative is to undercut the prices and watch while a shrewd eBayer with an eye for a bargain swoops in, re-sells and scoops the profits for himself.  The charity, meanwhile, banks its fiver with egg on its face – which result do you feel most comfortable with?

Image above from Flickr – abbyladybug.

What are your thoughts on charity shop pricing?  Too high?  Too low?  Just right?  I’d love to hear your opinions!

This has been a rather difficult Friday 5 for me.  At the risk of sounding all do-goody and annoying, I can’t say I’m overly fussed about Christmas gifts anymore.  I suppose it’s a concomitant part of growing up.  I still really love to see the faces of my young siblings light up when they realise that the all-knowing all-seeing Santa has bestowed the very thing they were pining for upon them (seriously, how does he get it so right, all the time?!).  But I myself am not really bothered anymore.  Christmas these days is about being at home, EATING and watching trashy television with my family.  If I get those things, I’m happy.  Easily pleased, huh?

Nevertheless, that wouldn’t make for a very interesting Friday 5!  So here we have five things that, while I could happily go without them, would definitely put a smile on my face come Christmas morning…

A stash of pretty fabric

I’m always on the lookout for pretty fabrics for sewing projects, but they can often be terribly expensive, not to mention a waste of money if the said sewing projects go disastrously wrong!  I’d really love, however, to have a good stock of dainty florals, quirky retros and bold geometrics in my sewing supplies basket, so that when the urge to make something springs itself on me I can get going straight away.  This would also be good for my Etsy endeavours (which, erm, haven’t started yet – who smells a New Years’ Resolution?).

A hammock

I don’t know why, but I’m really fascinated by the idea of having a hammock hanging from the ceiling somewhere in my flat.  I’d love to be able to jump into it and swing back and forth while I read a good book and sip a pina colada (or maybe just a cup of tea).  The logistics of introducing a hammock to a second floor Edinburgh-based flat are not really something I’m keen on pondering for very long, so if Santa could sort those out as well that’d be grand.

Snow

OK so it’s probably the cheesiest Christmas wish there is going, but I would really love a proper no-holds-barred white Christmas this year.  I want to curl up infront of It’s a Wonderful Life, eat lots of lovely food, drink mulled wine and watch some morbidly obese snowflakes plummet their way to the ground from a leaden grey sky.  I also want to go sledging.  Hardcore sledging.  And snowball fighting.  I’d love it if my entire street came out to play a great big snowball fight for oh, say, an hour, before we all went home for hot chocolate.  That’d be amazing.  Santa, if you could organise this I’d happily forfeit all material presents.

A stack of Pierre Hermé macaroons

These (above) keep popping up all over the internet, and by gosh do I wanna eat some!  I want to eat some, and then wear the rest.  Soooo pretty!

The much-coveted World Link necklace

Finally, I really love this necklace from uncommon goods.  It’s a map of the world, and I think it is so completely beautiful.  I’m not overly mad about necklaces (much more of a big earrings, big rings gal), but I’d definitely make an exception for this lovely little thing.

Don’t forget to pop over to the other ladies’ blogs today for a squint at their Friday 5 posts.  I’m off now, for three-ish weeks (I’m almost sad at the thought of not blogging for that length of time!).  I’ve scheduled some picture posts to make their way onto your screens in my absence, which I hope you’ll enjoy, and I’ll be back with some substantive writing in the week beginning Monday 6th September, hopefully also with a raft of exciting holiday tales to tell and photos to show.  Have lovely, lovely weeks everyone! xxx

Image above from Flickr – yuichi.sakuraba.

My fruit and veg box is delivered once a fortnight, straight to my door.  And a couple of months’ experience has convinced me that it’s a great service.  It saves me from making too many trips to the supermarket, which I hate with a vehement passion; it encourages me to make vegetables the main focus of my meals, and it also costs very little: £9 per week, inclusive of doorstep delivery.  That £9 buys me 11 different types of vegetable and five of fruit.  All organic, all locally produced, all insanely delicious.

The other great thing about the box is that it has forced me to get creative with my cooking, and to experiment with new dishes.  Before I signed up to the scheme I had never made aubergine parmigiana; or a green bean stew; or even a carrot cake for that matter.  Now, a couple of months in, I’ve made all three.  Some more than once.  I now cycle home with the greatest of enthusiasm every second Thursday, so eager am I to examine the new loot and decide what goodies I’m going to make with it.

But the biggest way in which the box has forced me to create in the kitchen has been in finding new and inventive ways to use up the truckloads of potatoes it brings my way every fortnight.  Potatoes are one of the crate’s ‘staple’ ingredients, which means a big bag of them arrives with every delivery, along with other basics like tomatoes, carrots, onions, apples and bananas.  And this has proved rather difficult for me – it always seems like I’m rushing to get through yet more spuds in time for the next batch arriving.  I’m like a crazy spud lady: ‘WE MUST EAT SOMETHING WITH POTATOES IN IT!!’ I scream at my hapless boyfriend with alarming regularity.  It’s far from a pretty sight, let me assure you.

But perseverance is (very slowly) beginning to produce results.  In the last month or so I’ve made home-made chips, fried potato and chorizo salad and potato dauphinoise.  I’ve also made a couple of potato curries, and added some diced spuds to a veggie chilli I had on the go.  And last night I found myself onto another winner: my own version of Fisherman’s Pie.

It might be August but that’s no reason not to indulge in a little hearty comfort food every now and then.  And that’s what Fisherman’s Pie, to me at least, is really all about.  Lovely chunks of succulent fish in a creamy white sauce, with spades and spades of mashed potato smoothed over the top.  I used leeks in my white sauce, and didn’t bother with parsley.  The effect was pretty lovely all the same…

Ingredients

• 5 or 6 large-ish potatoes
• 1 pack of mixed fish pieces.  This genius invention I found in my local Tesco.  Fresh chunks of salmon, cod and smoked haddock, together in the same pack for around £3.  I’d love to say I went to the fishmonger and hand picked the finest fillets I could see, heck, I’d love to say I paddled out to sea in a dingy and caught my own.  Alas, I did neither.  I have a full time job and a budget.  I ain’t got time for no fishin’.
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 leek, finely sliced
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• Lots of milk for poaching the fish, butter and flour for the white sauce.
• Salt and pepper to season

Method

• Heat the oven to around 180 degrees (my default temperature).
• Pour some milk into a pan and gently poach the fish over a very low heat.  Sweat the onion, leek and garlic in some butter.  Put the potatoes on to boil.
• Make a roux with some more butter and some plain flour, and gradually add milk.  I used the milk from the pan of fish for extra flavour (once the fish had cooked that is!).
• Stir the white sauce well, and keep stirring until it’s reasonably thick and smooth.  Add the leeks/onion mix and the poached fish, season with salt and pepper and stir.  Spoon into the bottom of an oven-proof dish.
• Once the potatoes are cooked through, drain them, and mash them however you like.  I normally use a blob of mayonnaise, salt and pepper, a little milk and some wholegrain mustard.
• Spread the mash evenly over the fish mixture and pop the whole thing into the oven for 20 minutes or so.  5 minutes before the end you can grate some cheddar over the top if that floats your boat.  It certainly does mine!

Serve and enjoy – fantastic fish pie, a recipe guaranteed to fill you up AND get rid of your excess spuds.  I enjoyed mine so much that I forgot to take a photo of it.  So you’ll have to make do with this pretty fisherman picture from Flickr, courtesy of Moonstar.