Halving Your Wardrobe?

Yep. That's how I spent last night.

First I pulled the drawers out of my dresser and went through them. How many t-shirts does one woman need? About half of what I started out with! Old pantyhose? Gone! Raggedy undies.....I resisted the urge to burn those.

Here are the before and after pics. They're not too dramatic, so you're going to have to trust me - I really did get rid of at least half!:

Before:



After:



That was the easy part. I moved next to my closet, which was a freaking disaster:





I took all my clothes out and piled them up on the bed. Then I counted them:




That heap represents 70 pieces of clothing. That's 4 dresses, 2 sweatshirts, 1 jean jacket, 5 shrugs (3 of which are brown!) 11 sweaters, 2 long sleeve shirts (what happened to the rest?), 12 short sleeve shirts, 1 tank top, 20 skirts, 2 pairs of sweatpants, 4 capris and 6 pants.

I needed to cull out 35 items. On my first pass I tossed 23. Hmmmm. I went through the pile again and reached 33. Pretty good!

Except then I remembered I'd packed away a bunch of things to get them out of my closet for the summer. They were hiding in a suitcase. When I unzipped it I found winter coats and twenty more pieces of my clothing! Things looked bleak. Now my total was 90: I needed to get rid of 45 in all.

Luckily, sometimes in your darkest hour a little ray of sunshine peeks in. There was a reason I'd packed away those clothes. A darn good reason. I whipped through them, tossing out old sarongs, bellydance accoutrements and the nasty football jersey I used to wear to play inline hockey. I totalled up my pile of cast-offs. Bingo!

Fifty-Two!

I won't bore you with an account of the rest of my closet. Let's just say that I've got a dressmaker's dummy up for grabs. Here's a picture of the final result. My husband still has too many clothes, but we'll deal with that later, after I break the news to him that we're downsizing: