Cold Weather Wardrobe Planning

I sew most of my clothes and am working towards having all of my clothes made be me. Growing up, when the weather changed from warm to cold or cold to warm we went out and bought some new clothes. I still have this habit, except I don't go shopping, at least not for clothes. Now I spend the months leading up to typical weather changing time (sept-oct), planning what I need to fill out the clothes I have.

So I've begun this process already and thought I'd share my methods with you. First, of course, I research. This involves three websites for me, pinterest, ravelry, and a new one called textillia. I usually start on pinterest, looking at my Enchanted Forest Style board to get an idea of the kinds of garments I want and an overall view of where I'm headed fashion-wise.  

Then I go to Textillia, which is Ravelry for sewing. It has lots of sewing patterns all in one place. You can save the patterns you like to your favorites and you have some other stuff like projects and a queue. I go through the patterns that I have saved and match a few with the ideas from Pinterest. This time I knew I wanted several dresses (basic for Mori), but I also wanted some skirts and blouses too. So those are the patterns I choose. Here's the line up for sewn clothes:

I finish off with Ravelry. The reason I work on the sewn clothes first, is that they are faster to make and are often cheaper materials, so unless I feel it would look much better in yarn, or I can't find a sewn pattern for it, I'd rather sew it then knit or crochet it. For this season I needed sweaters and cardigans, but I also wanted some knit skirts and a vest. These are the one I decided on:

The very last thing I do is thinking about and plan out the colors I want to use. I can be very picky about colors, so I always write down what shades I want to use for that season. I also do this, because if I don't, I find that I look for just pretty fabrics and my wardrobe leans to a few colors pretty heavily (too many good blue and green fabrics out there). It's also important to make sure you can create an outfit with each piece, so I need to make sure I either have or will be making things that can be paired. One main way I do this is by doing all of my accessory items (legging, coats, hats, scarves, gloves, ect) in neutral colors. This way I can pair those to any of my more bright colored clothes.

The colors I am planning on using for the fall/winter are:
Cranberry red
Plum
Navy
Ice blue
Brown 
Cream
Olive
Pine
Cooked Pumpkin/burnt orange
Dusty rose
Black
Charcoal
Burgundy 

What does your guys fall or winter wardrobe look like? Anyone have some fall or winter projects going or on their mind? Please share! If you guys are interested in following/checking me out on pinterest, ravelry, or textillia, click on the links and it'll take you to my profile for each of those sites. Hope to see you around!

August Update

Hello everyone!

Since graduating, I've trying to post more often and it hasn't happened as much as I wanted. Today I thought I would just update you guys on the goings on around here. First I got a new job! I now work at our local sewing machine dealer/vacuum dealer/fabric store. I'm still in training and will be for another month or two. I've been enjoying learning more about the sewing machine and being surrounded by fabric. One thing that I've been getting into since working there is machine embroidery. I already hand embroider, but the machine embroidery is fun and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it!

With me getting a job and working four days a week, we've been doing all that we can to keep up on all the household things. We've decided to scale back for a bit and try to catch up on some things. I've agreed to go down to only only flavor of kombucha for the time being to lessen the work load.

The yards and the garden have been needing some work, but we have a lot of fires in the area at the moment and it's been very smoky outside for the past two or three weeks. Many days is too smoky to go outside without putting stress on your lungs =[. This has made it really hard to go out and do our outside tasks. Plus it's put a stopper in our usual walks to the creek and our swims.

 We have decide to ignore the smoke and try to start doing all of our outside activities again starting next week. Hopefully that goes well. One of the first things we will be doing is watching the meteor shower from on top of Mt. Lassen. Sunday night both me and Tom have they day off, so we'll be driving up there late and hiking to the peak to watch the meteors above the light and the smoke. It will be nearly a new moon that night so it should be a good sight. We'll try to take some pictures with my film camera and share them if they turn out =].

As for the farther future, we are going to Germany in three weeks to visit my host family during my host sister's wedding. It's been about five years since we visited last and we're very excited to return. We'll be there for two weeks and are going to travel to the Rhein area and possibly to the Black Forest area. I'll make a post or two about it, so been watching for them in September.

I am also planning my cold weather wardrobe. It's quite a lot of work, but also very exciting. I'll make a separate post of all of that, because I have some cool resources to share with you guys =].

We have gotten a few things done, like hanging a new mirror for the office (sewing room) and building a garden shrine in the back yard, but we have many more planned. I'll do my best to take plenty of pictures of the coming project to share!

What have you guys been up to? For you other Californians out there, stay healthy in all this smoke!