But HOW do you pick?

75 articles of clothing sounds like a lot. But when you think about 7 days of underwear, several pairs of socks, PJs, shoes, etc, it suddenly is a lot less. I've been agonizing over the spreadsheet I created to organize my Dress is More wardrobe for the past week, and I'm still not 100% finished. It's HARD to narrow my wardrobe of literally hundreds of items down to 75.

I mean, seriously, here is my current clothing situation:

 Of course, the left side is mine. Naturally minimalist husband's are on the right.

 T-shirts and sweaters that won't fit into my bureau. There are also tons of sweaters under my bed that aren't shown here.

 Totally full of clothes.

These are my running clothes and scarves.

I'm facing some specific challenges. One, which I mentioned in my last post, is that I've recently lost some weight. This was a totally unintentional side effect of thinking it would be fun to run a half-marathon and training for said event. Unfortunately most of the "bottoms" of my wardrobe don't fit anymore without some serious belting, and some of my key "tops" are just too big. In some ways, this has been helpful in deciding which articles of clothing I'm including in my project list, but it also eliminates some of my more versatile pieces. For example, all of the 5 new pairs of work pants I bought are automatically in because, you know, they don't fall off my body when I wear them, but I had to do some serious fit sessions to determine whether my jean skirt was going to be appropriate (verdict: it has enough stretch that if I wash it weekly, it will shrink back up enough to be wearable. Also, while a little unorthodox, it is beltable).

Another challenge  is that I live in Vermont, and that means summer is, for all intents and purposes, on the way out. Planning for a potential seasonal change is challenging, but I'm attacking it by planning mostly short-sleeve tops in the project list and including lots of sweaters. This means, however, that a few sweaters need to be altered to fit, and I have tough choices such as the following:

Stripey sweater is definitely in, because it is new and awesome. But black sweater is so versatile (also, as the picture clearly shows, they are good friends...could I separate them?). But do I need black sweater if I have stripey sweater, who is the same color scheme? Yes! Wait, no? If I don't include black sweater, I get another shirt! But I might also regret it if, someday, I need the solid black sweater! AUGH!

This decision is not yet made, but I'm working diligently this week to figure it all out. I also promise to clean out the closet and post new pictures of the reduced wardrobe, which I am super excited about.