Hi everyone, it's Sarai. So Haley and I recently recorded this podcast talking about a wardrobe
planning technique that she sometimes uses called The Rule of Three Outfits and it was inspired by
an article in Seamwork magazine a while back called Pinpoint Your Style While Minimizing
Your Stash by Michelle Colistro Brown and in that article Michelle wrote about a technique
to plan your sewing and I'm just going to read a quote just directly from the article for you.
So she says "Whatever you're making, write down three outfits you can construct with that piece.
Three outfits. That's it. if you do this exercise for every single piece you make,
over time, you'll end up with a circular wardrobe of clothes that all complement each other. So
in this discussion, Haley's going to share the four steps that she uses to plan using this rule
and I hope you enjoy it and get some use out of it and if you try using a process like this
be sure to let us know in the comments. All right enjoy.
Why don't you walk us through the steps that you went through and maybe just kind of give
us an outline of how you might go about this if you wanted to try it out. Yeah, definitely. So the
first step is you want to pick a pattern that you really want to make. For me, I find it particularly
exciting and inspiring to pick a statement piece, but you don't need to, it could be a wardrobe basic
as well. So pick the pattern you want to make, think about the pattern itself - the silhouette, all of
that stuff. Also consider fabric, the season you're gonna wear it. That's gonna help you
have more information for when you start kind of building your outfits. Number
two, you wanna make a list of your preferences and considerations. So maybe this pink pair of pants
I know that I'm going to want to wear into the office but also have some more
like relaxed outfits that I'd want to wear on the weekend maybe if I went to like the nursery to go
pick up some plants or go grab a cup of coffee. So make these kind of preferences and what do those
things mean for you. So if I want to wear it on the weekends, it needs to like you know have some like
lightweight breathable, layerable options for when I'm going kind of indoors / outdoors really like
dive into that kind of stuff because it's going to help you create more practical outfits and not
just things that like seem really amazing and cool in a dream world and then draw these outfits.
Like I mentioned earlier you don't necessarily need to draw if drawing doesn't bring you joy.
You could mentally list them, you can get out your notebook and just create a little list, but for me
drawing helps me to envision proportion and color a little bit better. You could also probably do
this with a tool like Pinterest, just like kind of compiling inspiration as well if you want kind
of a happy medium between the two and then as a bonus you can repeat these three steps with a
second pattern. So let's say I built three outfits around these pink pants and through those
outfits I found you know what I really want to make like a linen jacket as well then make three
outfits around this linen jacket and you're gonna start to find that you have this very circular
mini collection and this whole process can be kind of copy and pasted continuously to start
honing in your personal style and creating a wardrobe that's super cohesive. I just think
that it's a really great simple tool for people who are interested in wardrobe planning but
need something a little bit more lightweight for their lifestyle or mental capacity in that moment.
Yeah, I was just thinking that the free planner that we have would be really helpful for this
because you could just, we have pages in there that have you know the space for you to kind of design
a whole look a whole outfit where you can write some notes about it so if you want to check that
out we'll put a link to that in the show notes too. It's totally free for you to download. Yeah, I think
another tool that really helped me when I was doing this personally was using the my body model
croquis, if for those of you who aren't familiar MyBodyModel is a super cool company. You go on
their website, it's really, really fun to do and you input a bunch of really comprehensive measurements
taken directly from your body and it takes all of that does some kind of magic and spits out a
croquis that looks like you and I think this is really cool when you're playing with proportion
and trying to build outfits. It's one thing to kind of imagine it, it's a totally
different thing to see those proportions on your actual body so you can build
I, I don't really subscribe to like "flattering" "unflattering," I, I think you just like do you,
wear what you want to wear, but see if it feels good to you, if those proportions are
proportions that make you feel really good because I was finding like oh yeah with this
particular pair of pants I think that I'm really going to mostly want to wear things that are
a more cropped length, that are like you know kind of navel length tops with this and longer
outer layers, it just really helped me to nail down those nitty-gritty details so I was like
buying enough fabric and I was going into these projects with a really concrete plan already.
Yeah, Yeah. Another thing that I've done for the, the croquis is, before my, MyBodyModel was around is
just to trace a picture of myself so just you could just take a picture of yourself with your
phone or whatever on a plain background print it out and then just trace the outline just to kind
of get an idea of your proportions and then draw on that. That's, it was an idea that was actually
I included it in the Colette Sewing Handbook years ago and I, I think that's really, that's
been really helpful too because I, I have a short waist so I don't really, my proportions are not
like a typical croquis that you would just you know find on the internet or whatever those are
usually like fashion model croquis that look nothing like, nothing like any human really but
I found that really helpful just to kind of get an idea and recognize what makes me feel
more comfortable and what makes me feel like less it doesn't really feel like me, you know?
And I think that's what this whole process is really about is really reflecting on
how you're gonna wear something, what's gonna make you comfortable, what's gonna work for you
and your lifestyle, and really connecting all of those dots together. Yeah, definitely. Cool well,
thank you for that Haley. So just to, just to recap the steps that Haley just went through
are to pick a pattern that you really want to make, and then make a list of whatever your preferences
and your own personal considerations are as you're as you're starting this process, and then draw
three outfits, or you could use Pinterest or you know make little mini mood boards or
however you want to do it, but just kind of create your concepts for these three outfits to build
around your your pattern of choice, and then if you want as a bonus you can repeat the process
with another pattern and then you have kind of like a little mini collection and you can kind
of just continue building your wardrobe from there. I think this process is so cool because it's so
simple and so easy and lightweight and doesn't require a lot of like really time intensive work
in order to create something that you're actually going to wear and get a lot of use out of. Yeah,
yeah.