Dairy Milk

Yesterday I wore purple and brown, which made me feel very like a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.

Necklace – made by Helen
Jacket – Debenhams
Dress – M&S via eBay
Vest and tights – M&S
Boots – Duo

This would have been yesterday’s post, but we went to the cinema and were late back and then my netbook decided to play silly buggers, so I decided it could wait until today. And anyway, today’s outfit was basically my red LK Bennett dress which really doesn’t photograph well so I probably wouldn’t have posted it.

Exotic marigold

Because we were going to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel this evening, today I wore my vaguely-exotic-looking necklace from Oxfam’s Fairtrade section (it has little charms hanging off it; a dagger, a heart, a dragonfly, a fish) and my orange shawl (as being the closest thing I have to the colour of marigolds).

Shawl – Aurantium
Necklace – Oxfam fairtrade
Dress – M&S via eBay
Boots – Duo

It’s a lovely film; lots of sunlight and bright colours, which are just the ticket in the gloomy fag-end of an English winter, and a storyline which is very much in the English-people-abroad tradition of E.M. Forster and The Enchanted April, but at heart is basically just about people being fundamentally decent and nice and helping each other and finding happiness because of that. It’s very, very funny too, but also a lot less frothy than I thought it was going to be. Which isn’t a problem at all; I’ll take apple crumble over candyfloss any day, and this was definitely a gorgeous apple crumble of a film*.

*Um, yes, there would be a reason I’m not a film blogger…

Browned off

I keep trying to wear this dress, but I’m coming to the conclusion that I really don’t like it very much. I bought it about four years ago because it was in the sale and my size, and I doubt if I’ve worn it ten times since then. The pattern is pretty, but the colour is dull, and it has three-quarter-lenth bell sleeves which makes it tricky to wear things over, and one of those annoying too-low necklines. It may be time to retire it to the charity shop bag. (It also strikes me that the times I’ve worn it and liked the outfit have been when I’ve worn it over a long-sleeved t-shirt in a colour, to counteract the draftiness of the sleeves and the overall brownness of the dress, but the shorter-sleeves-over-a-long-sleeved-t-shirt look is a bit too casual for me to wear for work now.)

Cardigan – Monsoon via Oxfam
Necklace – Oxfam fairtrade
Dress – Per Una
Tights – M&S
Boots – Timberland

I do like the cardigan, though I haven’t worn that very much since buying it last winter either. I’ve been thinking about how often I wear things since reading a blog post where the blogger mentioned having worn a pair of jeans she bought four years ago 17 times, which I think she thought was getting quite good wear out of them though to me that doesn’t seem like a lot of wear at all – only four times a year. But then, I really don’t know how often I would need to wear things to think I was getting a good deal. At the moment, I’m probably wearing the dresses I like best once every couple of weeks, my green and red jackets at least once most weeks, one or other of my smart pairs of boots every day, my jeans every evening, my Clothkits skirt and brown handknitted jumper for all of the last two weekends. Is that too often? Not often enough? Should I be trying to wear more of my wardrobe, or pruning it down so I only keep the things I actually wear? (There’s a lot I don’t wear; in my attempt to look smart for the new job I’m trying to curb my natural inclination towards layering and I think it’s the impossibility of finding tops I like with skirts without things layered over them that’s pushing me so strongly towards dresses right now.) I just don’t know. I suspect I have too many clothes and a good weed wouldn’t come amiss, anyway…

Orange crush

I wish I liked this jacket more than I do. It’s a gorgeous colour, and the boiled wool is a nice compromise between smart and cosy, but I think the combination of the unstructured shoulders and the boxy fit everywhere else just makes it not quite work for me. An orange cardi would probably be better…

Jacket – East
Necklace – Oxfam Trading
Brooch – handmade
Dress – M&S via eBay
Vest – M&S
Boots – Duo

I want to be a tree

Today I decided to wear brown with a mossy green jacket and a green shawl in a leafy lace pattern. It’s probably only the fact that it was a miserable cold day in December (featuring both hail and sleet, making me very glad to have decided to wear my waterproof Timberlands rather than my unknown-quantity Duo boots) that prevented me from being attacked by a woodpecker or climbed by squirrels. Well, that and the fact that outdoors I was wearing the usual purple coat and red hat and looking decidedly less tree-like.

Shawl – Acanthus
Jacket – Jigsaw
Dress – M&S via eBay
Tights – M&S
Boots – Timberland

Mustelid Monday

Following my ponderings about lower-cut necklines and whether or not they’re appopriate for the office, I decided it was probably worth investing in some new vest tops to go under my dresses; some of the ones I was wearing were definitely getting a bit old and saggy. Because Marks & Spencers only sell vests in pairs, that meant I ended up having to buy six vests to get the three colours I wanted, and getting three other vests in colours I might not normally have bought, like the cream one I wore today. That one might have remained at the back of the drawer, if it hadn’t struck me that the combination of cream front and brown dress was a little reminiscent of a stoat or a pine marten, and apparently I think looking like a small carnivorous mammal is a good thing for a Monday.

Jacket – Jigsaw
Necklace – shop in Burford
Vest – M&S
Dress – M&S via eBay
Boots – Duo

Maybe next week I’ll go for an otter-inspired outfit…

In between days

It looks as though we’ve left the glorious weather behind with the Bank Holiday weekend, and instead we have typical spring weather; overcast with temperatures in the mid-teens and occasional glimpses of sunshine. I find this kind of weather the most difficult to dress for; it’s not warm, but it’s not really cold either, and humidity often makes it feel warmer than it is. If I wear summer clothes and go bare-legged I feel underdressed, and am liable to be cold, but I don’t want to wear too much because walking anywhere will warm me up in no time, and if the sun comes out it will feel quite hot.

I hate having cold feet, though apart from that I’m happy to be on the cool side, so my usual solution is to wear summery clothes with tights which I can take off if it gets hotter than forecast. I hate the feel of sheer tights and find fishnets quite uncomfortable, so I tend to go for opaque tights instead, either in bright colours or neutrals (brown and grey). Which is exactly what I did today.

Necklace – made by Helen
Dress – Florence & Fred via charity shop (this is the other dress I got in Stratford on Saturday)
Vest – Primark
Tights – M&S
Shoes – Skechers

I did have a cardigan and a pashmina, but as I’d rather expected it was warm enough in the office that I only wore them outside.