My Outfit - Cute Dress

Dress - White House Black Market - Similar @ WHBM - @ Amazon

Scarf - ?? - Similar

Leggings - White House Black Market - Similar @ WHBM - @ Amazon

Booties - Madden Girl - Similar @ Amazon - @ DSW

Wow, I have no idea what I was doing when I wore this outfit, but I do know, I really like it!  It is a very simple dress from WHBM that is super comfy.  It also has a wonderful texture to it.  I really like texture, if you don't know.  Well, and of course, I really like black and white.  So there is that.  Plus, the pattern on the dress is super cute.  It is little flower plants printed all over it.  Totes adorbs!

Recently I did something that I found to be super amusing, I did a massive spring cleaning of my wardrobe.  Well, it isn't really spring time anymore is it?  Not with temps around here getting into the 100s.  Anywho - I do like to go through my clothes somewhat frequently and rid myself of the excess baggage hanging in my closet and hiding in my drawers.  I ended up getting rid of about three to four bags of old items.  But that was not the amusing part.  The amusing aspect was in trying to determine if my outfits could work for this next school year. 

I am still quite undecided as to how I will chose to be presenting this coming school year.  Some days I am set solidly on going dressed in a far more female manner, while other days I think, oh hell no!  Time will tell for sure.  However, while going through my closet it did become kind of a thing to look at each item and decide if it was work appropriate or not.  How many outfits do you think I got up to?  The answer is about fifty to sixty. 

Yup, at least fifty to sixty different outfits that I could wear to work without repeats.  Wow!  I mentioned to my wife that I think I have been planning all along to go to work wearing these outfits.  When she questioned me as to why I said that, she seemed surprised and said, "I thought you just liked nice clothes."  Well sure, I do like nice clothes, but why exactly is it that I have such a large collection of outfits that are super work appropriate?  Hmmm... makes me wonder for sure!

So, uh, yeah, there you go! 

Love you!

Love yourselves!

(I super hope you are trying to love yourselves, I really do!)

Clothes Storage - Revisiting my Dresser

You may or may not remember my original post on my dressers, but recently I made some changes that I thought I would share.

Not much has changed in this area.  This is my hidden jewelry box that is in the top of the dresser.  Notice in the other pictures you can't tell that the top lifts up?  Yeah, that is my invention.  Cool, huh?

Oh yeah, if you don't know, I built these dressers.  It is part of a cherry wood bedroom furniture set that I am constructing over time.  I have 3 dressers done and two nightstands.  I need to do the bed and a blanket chest still.

First change.  No more segregating my clothes.  It used to be that my female clothes were in one location and my male clothes were in another.  Now I have put all my clothes together.  If they are sweaters, they are all in the same drawer.  Same thing with shorts, shirts, etc.

  

Maybe in the picture above, as opposed to the one on the right, you can better see my inspiration Barbie.  She sits on top of a hat box on my little dresser and watches over me.  I suppose she is my fairy Barbie mother.

Okay in this picture you can see the other big change from the last time I showed you my dresser.  I saw a pin about rolling your clothes, so I tried it.  Wow, it works great!  There is so much more room in my drawers than before.  I was actually able to remove a bunch of stuff from my very cramped closet and get it to all fit in this drawer.

This is my sweater drawer.  Can you tell which ones are my male sweaters?  They tend to be the darker colored ones.  The sweaters I did not roll up, they are set on their sides.  Again, this was a huge space saver as well as allowing me to see all of my sweaters upon opening the drawer.

                                                                                                                                                          This drawer used to be impossible to deal with.  It contains all of my shorts and sweat pants.  The shorts did not get rolled, they are just placed on their sides.  The larger items, like sweats and such did get rolled and then placed on their sides.  I saved so much room in this drawer, and again I can actually see everything in it.  I love this drawer especially.

The bottom drawer.  This drawer contains all of my fancy work pants and all of my yard work pants.  Two things about this that I think are funny.  One - my work pants are now rolled and stuffed into a drawer, being as I rarely if ever wear them anymore.  yeah I kind of gave up on the fancy pants for work.  The second thing I find funny about this drawer is that in my yard work jeans section there are female jeans in there now.  I have finally owned some girl jeans long enough that they have made their way in my yard work jean section.  How funny.

 

Just a little quotey-poo for your Monday.

Learn to love yourself, because you live a life that deserves it.

Love life, because you live a life that deserves it.

Flip Book Outfit Creator

While doing the outfit portion of my July challenge I discovered a big difficulty with putting my outfits together, I couldn't actually look at all of clothes in a very efficient manner.  Most of my clothes are stored in the drawers of my dresser, as shown in this post, and they obviously stacked on top of each other.  If I want to see what I have I used to have to pull out almost all of my clothes just to see what I have.  Now all I do is to flip through the pictures of my clothing items.

I told my wife of my idea and she decided to join me.  We posted up some white paper on the wall, set the camera on the tripod, put on a clothing item, and took a picture.  It did not take nearly as long as we thought it would.

After we were done we printed them out, cut them, and organized them.  I chose to put them together into these groups: dresses, tank tops, tops, bottoms, and shoes.  This is what they look like:

Dresses:

Tank Tops:

Tops:

Bottoms:

Shoes:

What I will then do is to find something I would like to wear and flip through the other books and find something that I think will go with it.  I often try to find a few different options that will work together.  This is what it look like when I put them together.

In total it took probably about 4 to 5 hours to put everything together.  Now that it is done it has helped greatly in me being to put together a variety of outfits which have utilized all the clothes that I own and not just the ones that happen to be in the top of the drawers.

Love Ya!

Refining Your Wardrobe

To purge is a love-hate thing for most crossdressers.  If you don't know, a purge is when you take every girl thing you own and throw it away in attempts to give up crossdressing.  I experienced a purge only one time in my life.  I still miss a certain black dress that I had before I threw it all away.  At that time I truly thought that I was done with crossdressing and that I would never want any of that stuff anymore.  Well obviously that was not the case, huh?

Now what I see is that I often have a difficult time in getting rid of anything.   I keep thinking that I should hold on to things because you never know when you might want it again.  Well this past weekend I pushed myself to go through my Spanx like garments as well as my bras.  Both of those things are very difficult for me to get rid of.  This process also dealt with all of my breast inserts.

I get most of my inserts from The Breast Form Store.  I really like the ones that I have gotten from there.  I generally get the Gold Seal Classic Attachable Breast Forms.

Anyways, I had a size 6, a 5, a 4, and a 1.  I say that I had them, because I decided to get rid of them all.  My wife took the size 1's.  They make her boobs look HUGE!  Wow, jealousy much?  Yea, lots!  She has great boobs.

Okay, off topic again.  Since I decided to get rid of those inserts I also got rid of about half the bras I owned.  I will tell you, that was hard!  I really struggled with doing that, but it was certainly needed.  I had some bras in there that I probably had not worn in a couple of years.  And the really nice thing is that the bras that I kept all look really nice and fit really well.

Fellow crossdressers and fashionistas, here is my advice to you.  Go through your clothes regularly and make donation bags for things that have gone out of style, of things that no longer fit you, or things that you just don't wear anymore.  Don't think of it as a purge, think of it as a refinement.

Through years of refining my own wardrobe, I have found my own personal style and I am much happier.

Do you refine?  Or do you purge?  Or do you hoard?

Oh, I have a few pairs of really nice, $200, inserts available if you are interested, message or email me.

Shoe Storage

Well awhile ago  I wrote that I should show you how I store my shoes so I finally got around to taking pictures of what I do.  I do think that I got this idea from Sal over at Already Pretty.  For 2/3 of my girl shoes I took pictures of them, put the shoes into a shoe box and placed the picture on the outside of the box.

This has made my shoe collection much more manageable, and clean.  Generally I do not wear my shoes enough for the dust to stay off of them and now with them being boxes they are completely dust free.  Before I did it I thought that I would be bothered with the hassle of having to take my shoes out of a box but I totally don't mind it at all.  In fact I love my shoe storage now.  It is very convenient and helps my shoes to stay nice.

This shows one third of my girl shoe storage. 

This is the other third of my girl shoes storage.

This is the last third of my girl shoe storage, but as you can see it is kind of mixed in with some of my guy shoes also.

This shows mainly my guy shoes, but a pair of my girl flats are also showing.

So on the floor of my closet  I have two shoe racks which hold mostly guy shoes and a few girl shoes.  Most of my girl shoes are stored in boxes which are stored on the shelves in my closet.

Overall I really like the system but I do wonder what will happen once I get too many shoes to fit on the shelves that I have.  But I figure I could probably get about 5-10 more pairs up there before I really have to worry about it.

There you have it, I hope I have inspired you to organize your own shoe space.