ivory Archives

Start with Art: Building a Travel Capsule Wardrobe based on Mountains and Sea by Helen Frankenthaler

I think we're going to have an art week; art transcends all things...

It's Truly Summer... Now that she's free to travel again, she's going to get on the train and go someplace she's never been. She randomly chose a train stop, and now she's spending a long weekend in a small city she's never visited!

She's decided that she wants to feel summery, and light, and free...

Her pants come in TEN colors...

Everything won't go together perfectly. Things will get dirty. She doesn't really mind; laundry can be done, outfits can be repeated, and she's okay with this. She knows what's important...

She packs her favorite things, and she's going to be perfectly delighted with her travel wardrobe:

Once she checks her ... View the Post

Start with Art: Building a Travel Capsule Wardrobe based on Icebound by John Henry Twachtman

The first day of Spring! And our anniversary...

Quite Enough Solitude, Thank You... Now that they're free to travel again, they're making plans...

Their favorite apartment in their favorite city is available for a few days, and they are OFF!

No more wearing sensible sweatpants and warm shirts while working from home. No more being sensible PERIOD, for a while....

They've walked miles every evening in their neighborhood; they've exhausted pretty much any avenue of exploration left to them! Now, in their favorite city, they're going to go down every alley, every turn that seems uninteresting, any corner that appears to lead to a dead end...

This will eat out - of COURSE they will! But they will also pick up some ... View the Post

I Love IT, but Will I Wear IT? Ivory Cardigan

I was despairing of what I was going to post, when I got an email asking about a cardigan of a different color! I'm so grateful for you all...

My heroine didn't tell me what her favorite neutral is, so yet again I'm going to experiment with this sweater worn with a handful of neutral colors. There's pretty much no color that this wouldn't go with; I might hesitate about wearing it with pure white, but then again...

I love the way ivory looks with chambray - it makes it feel sort of dressed up. Definitely not the way denim colors usually look!

I like ivory and grey together - they're both softly muted... The scarf actually looks a lot better tied than it does laying out flat, but I couldn't find a good ... View the Post

How to Build a Travel Capsule Wardrobe by Starting with a Bracelet – January

Time for another great bracelet! This is a special thought for all of you who love brown and all warm colors...

That little touch of the rust in the beads is lovely...

Just a Small Change of Habit... She quit buying coffee during the day at work. There was never any good reason to go downstairs and wait for coffee, when there's a perfectly decent coffee maker just down the hall. But SO many people used coffee as an excuse to be out of their office for 20 minutes, and it never occurred to her that it wasn't a good idea...

'Til she looked at her monthly expenditures! A couple of months of "office coffee" and she could take a long weekend someplace... warmer. Not necessarily beachy, but somewhere that was sandal-friendly during ... View the Post

Start with Art: A Holiday Rebel Six-Pack with Azalea Garden by Patrick Heron

Their Calendar...

They both work on computers, so when they have something to schedule, they put the event onto a computer calendar that they share...

One of them decided to glance ahead to December, just to see what was planned... And realized that, between them, they had committed to attend FIVE different events in a 3-day period. All of them downtown.

The obvious answer? A hotel room, some late mornings with room service, and a tidy holiday travel capsule wardrobe with NO black velvet (this woman is a heretic, in my world!), nothing red, and nothing green.

Red and green really aren't her colors, and standing out in a crowd of friends makes her happy...

I personally can't fathom living through ... View the Post

September Start with a Bracelet

Oooh....

Who needs lots of colors, when you have THESE????

The Manuscript Will be Available... For just a few days... She's going to be there lecturing for a week; it could NOT have been better timing!

She plans what she will pack - she knows that once she's there, she won't want to think about clothes, so she's making it pretty much foolproof.

Days in the Manuscript Conservation Room will be casual, completely with white gloves! And the lectures will be a little bit more dressy; she's quite certain that some professors there will sit in...

Since navy is her neutral, she knows that she wants to start here:

Since she's finally going to unlock the secrets hidden in that most elusive document, she realizes ... View the Post

The Weekly Timeless Wardrobe, Week 10: Neutral Print or Patterned Top

I'm in Pittsburgh... I'd be a true ingrate if I didn't give a hearty shout-out to the lovely people at Crazy Mocha who let me sit in their store while I finished this post. If you see a Crazy Mocha location, patronize them!

What differentiates this top from the one you added to your wardrobe last Monday is the degree of print. I see this top as being something that makes a little bit more of a statement - a more visible stripe, or a more pronounced floral. You could stick with something subtle, if that's what you like!

This first top would be lovely for someone who wears jeans frequently...

There aren't a ton of guidelines for this purchase: stay in your color palette and your chosen silhouettes and you should be ... View the Post

Spring Travel: Pilgrim of the Absolute by Brian Fahlstrom

She's Very Excited... Her company is organizing a pilgrimage from Paris to Mont-Saint-Michel! She's never been there... She's arranged for pilgrimages from Paris to Chartres, but this is new! (in an ancient kind of way!)

She's going to drive up from Paris, along the route the pilgrims will walk. She will stop to walk small segments of the route, to make sure that there aren't unexpected construction issues, or other blockages that will be a problem... And she needs to pack with a plan; her rental car is tiny!

Our heroine starts with her inspiration painting and color palette:

The weather will be warm when she lands in Paris, but she knows that she would be insane to fly without a cardigan or other warm layer; airplanes can ... View the Post

A French 5-Piece Wardrobe in Ash Rose (with Camel and Ivory!)

It's not easy to find camel, nor ivory, but I did my very best! And I included this print shirt (although I know I've used it before) because I like it a lot.... Sometimes that all that's required!

So before we go off in search of a pretty French 5-Piece Wardrobe for spring, let's assemble a very practical, but lovely, Common Wardrobe:

As should always be the case with a well-chosen Common Wardrobe, plenty of combinations are clearly available, for a wide range of weather and dressiness:

Here's where the fun/work starts! Even though Pantone tells us that this is one of the colors of the year, not a lot of clothing companies have jumped onto this particular bandwagon. That said, a big of persistence turned up some really lovely ... View the Post

Another Wardrobe Disaster…

This is almost the same wardrobe that we saw back on February 7th; I've made a couple of changes so that our new "dilemma" is clear...

This is her starting wardrobe; there's nothing really WRONG here - they're all perfectly nice clothes, but she struggles, and often feels that she doesn't look... pretty...

So she goes through the same exercise that we've seen before - does she have the right general assortment of pieces? Yes, this seems fine...

Is it the colors? She feels in her gut that she's got a color "issue..." She's always been told that she was an Autumn, but the colors feel muddy and heavy to her... She's got blue eyes, and freckles, and she feels more... light? than the colors that are suggested for her...

She ... View the Post

A Colorful Moon by Alain Paillou – Start with Nature to Inspire a Tote Bag Travel Wardrobe

Once in a .... She almost didn't pick up the call when it came in; she didn't recognize the number, but something told her that it was important...

It was the Probate Court down in the capital... She needed to come down because she was a beneficiary of her great-aunt's estate...

And - oh yes - there was a check being FedEx'ed to her to offset her expenses. She was planning to take the train down, so she didn't really expect to have expenses...

A REALLY BIG CHECK! With a note from her great-aunt telling her to spend it ALL on herself, and to really be silly about it...

Well okay, if that's what she really wants, I must respect her wishes, right?

If this is the expense money, it's anybody's guess what the actual inheritance ... View the Post

Flowers in a Crystal Vase by Edouard Manet – Inspiration for Tote Bag Travel

You're a Soil Conservation Engineer?

"I can't imagine spending all of my time working with dirt!"

It's SOIL, not dirt...

"It just doesn't seem like there would be that much to do - it's dirt! It's all over the ground! What else is there to know?"

Well, keeping it all from washing away into rivers, and thus into the ocean, is a good start...

"And you're going on a business trip? What can there possibly be to talk about? Dirt isn't really that interesting..."

But new ways to conserve and enrich soil can be fascinating, and it's always great to be able to spend some time with people who share you passion for the SOIL...

"Something that's really hard for me to understand - this just doesn't seem like a very... feminine... line of ... View the Post