Stefan Johansson - Street Lights along Klarälven River Archives

May 2025 Six Paintings – 12 Months #5 – Street Lights by Stefan Johansson

May 2, 2025

You know, if you chose to build your wardrobe around this painting, you'd have more colors available that I show in this wardrobe. (I've got to draw a line somewhere, to avoid being completely overwhelmed!)

There's some lovely blue in the water here, for example:

This wardrobe would serve one well for much of the year, or for a range of weather conditions. I wouldn't want to go somewhere blisteringly hot with this, but anything short of that would be just fine:

With upcoming hot weather in mind (in the Northern Hemisphere!), our heroine grabbed a pair of shorts and another pair of sandals, as well as two summer tops. And a really cool sweatshirt, with a quilted cable pattern in it. I love a good ... View the Post

April 2025 Six Paintings – 12 Months #6 – Street Lights by Stefan Johansson

April 8, 2025 It's snowing in Chicago. It might just be "lake-effect" snow - I live within sight of Lake Michigan - but it's still startling, in April. But this heroine, big fan of the warmest, most intense colors, is ready for Spring! As has been true for all of our heroines, her 16-piece wardrobe from the end of March would be a great wardrobe for travel that included a range of temperatures: This heroine feels that her colors are hard to find, and she therefore grabs things that she sees in her colors as soon as they're available. I'm not actually certain that these colors are all that rare; I suspect we might find that we need to really stock up on olive and off-white at some stage. But she's right - who could resist this ... View the Post

The First of Six Paintings-Twelve Months, March 2025

March 3, 2025

March! Even though we still have to wear winter clothes in Chicago, once it's March we pretend that it's spring. At least the days are long enough to go out for a quick walk after work - that makes SO much difference.

This month, I'm starting here, with a change/addition to our color palette:

This is the 12-piece wardrobe that our heroine has assembled through the first two months of her project:

Frankly, this wardrobe was feeling DARK. For a heroine with fair, freckled skin and hair somewhere in the red/russet family, it got to be TOO dark... So an executive decision was made to add ivory to this wardrobe. Well, you can call it bone, or unbleached, or off-white, but the effect is the ... View the Post

The Second of Six Paintings – Twelve Months February 2025

February 4, 2025

This will warm us up!

Our heroine is committed to building a wardrobe in these colors; her patience might be tried, finding clothes! Beautiful as these colors are, they're not ubiquitous...

At the end of January, this was our heroine's eight-piece wardrobe. It all goes together nicely, and includes a deeply beautiful scarf!

This month there wasn't any grouping of clothes, or complete outfit, that appealed to our heroine, so she instead found four garments that are perfect in her wardrobe, and pretty doggone lovely, too!

The scarf she found is relatively small - it's described as a bandana. In the warm weather, tied in her hair, or to the handle of her tote bag, or around her wrist, it will be a ... View the Post

Six Paintings – Twelve Months January 2025 Part 1

January 1, 2025

Happy New Year! We've got new paintings, new heroines, and new wardrobes to build - what fun!

This year, I'm going to try to start all of our heroines with basics, and so I've dredged out the Weekly Timeless Wardrobe list for reference. I'm not sure that I'm going to keep using it for the entire year, but as a guide in the early days of a wardrobe, it may be helpful.

Let's jump in and start with some Georgia O'Keeffe. I think I've used one of her paintings almost every year - she's just THAT good...

I could have broken out a number of shades of blue and green for this color wheel, but I wanted to think of these colors as all being closely related, on a spectrum. We shall see how that works!

Our heroine ... View the Post