Capsule query - Do work clothes 'work' at a wedding?

I went to Sheffield for some friends’ wedding reception last weekend. The whole do was steam punk themed and in my normal life I would have used this as an excuse to go bonkers on a costume, however the challenge didn’t offer me that option – so instead I had to pick something already on the list. I went for my green silk dress and black heels. I thought because I looked wedding appropriate that I’d get away with it, but it turn out what I wear is as much about how I feel in my clothes as how I look in them.

Day 78 -Me & Donna at the wedding

When I began this challenge I thought a lot about how I could make sure I had clothes that looked right for all of the occasions I might have to go to. And I think I’ve done pretty well with 23 items so far to cover looks appropriate for all sorts of occasions. What it turns out I hadn’t thought about was that I buy clothes for the impression I’m trying to make in them, and that wearing the same dress to a wedding as I wear to speak at conferences might cause me some confusion.

I bought the dress I wore to the wedding just over a year ago to wear to speak at a conference, since then I’ve worn it to several more conferences, meetings at government departments and with trustees, events at Westminister, donor meetings and other professional settings. This dress has become my sartorial ‘safe pair of hands’ outfit. I wear it almost exclusively when I am trying to exude trustworthiness, reliability and good sense.  And because I wear it for this sort of thing, it has become a part of my armour – I associate particular behaviours with it and weirdly I find it more natural to live those behaviours when I’m in it. In this dress I stand a little taller, talk a little slower and swear a whole lot less.

Which is perfect for work based occasions. But this weekend I wasn’t at work. I was with my husband and a load of friends I have known since I was a teenager, celebrating a wedding in the back room of our local pub. The behaviours expected of me in this environment are really very different and I was struggling to make the transition.

People kept asking me if I was ok and I kept telling them that weirdly I just didn’t feel able to let go the way I normally would. I felt like I was at a professional event – like I should be diligently networking, and writing notes about connections between people I’d said I would follow up. And that’s not what I should have been doing.

I should have been giggling with my friends about how easy it is to photograph Heathers calves so they look like a bum, throwing shapes on the dance floor and covering myself in red lipstick. You know - this kind of stuff....

Of course – there was a way to get past the whole professional boundaries thing. Not a mature, healthy or advisable way, and a way I regretted on the bumpy train ride home – but none the less. It turns out a short cut to feeling like you are 19 again, is to drink like you are 19 again. A fab night was had by all – though the (predictable) side affect of this was that I woke up the next morning feeling (and looking) 80.

Day 79 - Hangover has aged me by a decade!

So lesson learnt? Even with very few wardrobe choices if you live a life where your professional and personal lives are miles apart, it might be worth identifying which clothes work best for which areas. Personally that dress – it’s just for sensible times for the rest of the year – mainly because I don’t want to find myself channelling ‘naughty Ed’ at a work event.

Can I just take a moment to thank you all both for your donations (not even 3 months into the year and already we’ve raised nearly half the target – THANKYOU), and for reading and sharing the blog. I’m not really sure how it happened but there have been more than 8500 views on this blog so far. Wow! 

Lots of you lovely people have been in touch with me and I’m really loving hearing from you – please keep the comments and emails coming. One thing a number of you have asked is how it’s easiest to follow the blog. Well I’ve just joined Bloglovin’, it’s a fab site that lets you follow all the blogs you like in one place. There is a follow button on my sidebar – if you join you’ll get an alert everytime I post new content – plus it’s a doorway to all sorts of other cool blogs, like this one.

 

So THANKYOU, and since it looks like the rain has stopped just in time for the weekend I really hope you all have lovely sunny Saturdays,

Ed x

Can your capsule wardobe survive the wear? My sandals haven't

Yesterday I completed my 8th week doing the clothes of my back challenge and I've begun to realise something a bit scarey. When you wear your clothes a lot - they wear out really fast!

I appreciate the rest of you probably knew that - but for me this is genuinely a bit of a shock. I was prepared for my clumsyness to rob me of an item (hello grey t-shirt, don't worry I have plans for you....), but I thought everything else would just tick along for the whole year. But already I can feel my tshirts getting thinner with each wash.

And worse my sandals are beginning to give up the ghost. 

On the third or fourth day of the challenge I went to the pub with some fellow dog owners and a couple of them expressed real concerns about my sandals. They all know how much time I spend walking and didn't think they'd last the course. I naturally poo pooed them explaining that the rules allowed me to wear my walking sandals when I was walking the dog (as long as it wasn't a social walk that'd end up with a coffee or a meal somewhere), so the sandals wouldn't really see that much punishment.

How wrong can one person be. What I think I'd forgotten about myself is three things:

• I walk a lot. Everywhere, all the time. Even not counting walking the dog I probably do 6-8000 steps a day
• I like to get my toes out. So if it's not raining I will be wearing sandals. So far I've worn them 37 out of 56 days. That is 66% of the time. I start wearing sandals in March and rarely put them away until October. If I continue to wear them at this rate for that long we are talking 146 days of wear.
• I'm not 23 anymore.

Not being 23 anymore might feel a bit irrelevant here - but it isn't. I truly wish that sometime in my late teens or early 20's someone had taken me aside and told me, really convinced me that continually slamming my heels against the pavement in paper thin soled shoes would come back to haunt me. I wore ballet shoes (note not ballet flats - actually wear to dance class when you are 6 ballet shoes) to tramp around Sheffield for years.

I can't do that anymore. The padding on my heel has worn down after years of abuse and feeling the pavement through my shoes hurts now. It sends shocks of pain up my legs, it's more than a little bit grim. And about two weeks ago this began to happen with my sandals. 

I panicked a bit about this - I don't really have room for another pair of shoes in the capsule ( I currently have 4 and have allowed for 5 with some winter boots), unless I'm prepared to sacrifice a winter jumper or a second pair of jeans. But equally there is another 109 days when I'm going to want to be wearing sandals to get through that I can't spend in pain.

So my first thought was to try and fix them. The lovely chaps at the cobblers put on new soles for me. This gave me an additional couple of millimeters between me and the pavement. What they couldn't do anything about was the wear on the cork, which has basically compressed as a result of an 11 stone woman taking 260,000 steps in them and so has lost it's shock absorbing qualities.

Insoles in sandals are a tricky issue, I always think a visible insole in a sandal is slightly revolting. Just a receptacle for sweat and odour  - a sanitary towel for the foot. This is not an option for me. But after a bit of a search around I found some gel pads in M&S. I took some photos of them here - they are not pretty! They are also super tricky to get into sandals that have anything that goes over the top of your foot.

Still eventually I got them in, they are invisible once the sandals are on and they are a tiny bit more comfortable. But if I'm honest will they see me through another 109 days of wear? Doubtful. And the attempt to get them fixed wasn't cheap either £25 for the new soles and £5 for the gel pads. I'm really aware that these repair attempts wouldn't be an option for some of the parents Contact a Family support, who are struggling to make ends meet due to the extra costs of raising a child with additional needs. And being comfortable in your shoes isn't a luxury.

Anyway, I think you can expect to see a new pair of sandals being added to this mix over the next week or so. Which means there is something else I won't be able to have come winter - so let's just hope it's a mild one!

Why am I putting myself through this you may ask? Because 65% of families with disabled children Contact A Family spoke to said they went without essentials like clothes in order to cover the additional costs of meeting their child's needs.

This is not ok and I'm raising money for Contact A Family and awareness of the challenges families face through the #clothesoffmyback extreme capsule challenge. You can help by donating to Contact A Family's work supporting these families here and by sharing my posts through your social networks.

 Finally for all you rules checkers out there here is what I wore on days 55 and 56

The shiney thing that has made my day

I thought the thing I'd miss most this year would be my vintage dresses. I took the decision ahead of the challenge that my favourite couple of dresses simply wouldn't stand up to daily wear. They were handmade in the 50's and everything about them is just a bit fragile. I decided that I'd sell most of them and just put aside the ones I couldn't bear to part with for a years rest.

But they are not what I've missed most. What I've missed most has nothing to do with the challenge, except as far as my sense of identity goes.It's something I'm allowed to wear as far as the rules of the challenge go, but that through a little twist of fate I couldn't.


Just over 5 years ago a couple of weeks before my 30th birthday, Laura and I headed to the E17 Designers fair, if you live in or around Walthamstow it's worth looking out for. We have some talented artists and makers around here, and there is always something to spark your imagination. I'd picked up a couple of presents for people and was about to head out for a glass of wine when something shiny caught my eye.

That shiny thing was this gold necklace.

 

Something about it really appealed to me. I couldn't work it out. It broke both of the 'buying Ed jewelry she'll like' rules which are (or were), I don't wear gold, and chunkier is better. But I couldn't stop looking at it.

Anyway - I had a chat to the lovely designer Faith (her website is here) who gave me her card so I could go away and think about it. And I thought about it (a lot) and in the end asked Matt to buy it for me for my 30th - for whatever reason I didn't use Faiths website (I don't know if she had one then?) but just gave Matt her card and described the necklace as being 'like the sun'.

Looking back this was a huge risk - I hadn't seen anything else Faith had designed so I could have got anything. For all I knew she could have had a whole collection made up of those horrible grinning suns (she doesn't - all her stuff is very tasteful). Thankfully Faith remembered what I had been looking at and I got exactly what I wanted.

And since then I've worn it nearly every day, somehow everything else I own looks nicer alongside it. Even though it's tiny and it's light there is a comforting weight around my neck when I put it on, and when I'm nervous I rub it between my fingers.

Until I popped to Sheffield without it for a weekend, came back and couldn't find it anywhere. The weekend I was away Matt had taken up & relaid the bathroom floor, after turning the house upside down I came to the conclusion it was under the bathroom floor. I asked Matt to take up the floor to look for it and he (because he is in full possession of his senses) said no.

And so I started this challenge with simpler clothing, and a whole jewelry box full of other necklaces, but without the one thing that lifted everything I own. Every day I've got dressed and found myself lifting my hand to my throat and feeling the absence of it.

Until today. I have worked from home today and Matt is working lates this week, so when he went out to run an errand mid morning I assumed he was out getting drill bits or whatever plumbers use (really - Matt knows nothing about legislation around disabled children's rights, why would I know anything about plumbing...) Of course because he is an excellent husband he had in fact been over to Faith's to pick me up another necklace to replace my old one. 

I can't tell you how happy I was to see it. 

Matt put it on me straight away but something wasn't right, the comforting weight wasn't in the same place. The chain was a slightly different length to the one I'd had before. I still loved it, but it didn't feel like my necklace.

This is why it's so great to buy from local makers though - because when I texted Faith to say I thought my last chain was 3cm longer - she didn't ignore me, or call me a spoiled brat, or try and charge me gazillions for the change- she invited me to pop round to hers so she could put it on a longer chain. So I knocked off work a half hour early and did just that.

Here is Faith sorting out my chain and being very lovely about the second Archer home visit of the day.

And here is me on Day 46 feeling really comfortable and happy with my lovely necklace back round my neck.

 

 I'm feeling so happy about the whole thing I've donated an extra tenner to Contact A Family - if you want to join me (as at today 7th July 2015 - we've raised £1270 plus gift aid so far) you can push us a little closer to our target here

My phone is not making this easy on me

Apologies again for last weeks crummy photo quality. At least the first couple of days this week are going to be similarly pants.

Here's me yesterday:



Here's me today:



I know that those of you that sponsored me want to keep an eye on me to make sure I'm following the rules, and that ideally the images shouldn't be all grainy and shite. The thing is though my phone hates me.

Not only does the camera not have a flash (meaning it's impossible to take a decent photo not only in the evening, but lets face it between the months of November and March), but the bloody cable has stopped working. This means that I might be able to post things on instagram, but retrieving them to use on my blog is a two hour ordeal involving a lot of swearing, one full on pillow thumping paddy and two large books being thrown across the room. I know - it's unfair on the books but the computer belongs to work and the phone (much as it's my mortal enemy as regards its capacity to take and share photos) is how I keep in touch with my mum, my husband and everyone else who doesn't use social media.

I've done a bit of research today about what I can do to make the photos better both for instagram and for the blog. Basically the internet offered up two options: buy a wifi enabled camera, or get an iphone.

The thing is I have a great camera, and a cool little instax mini, and I don't really want to make the significant investment that a wifi enabled camera costs right now. And as for iphones HAVE YOU SEEN HOW MUCH THEY COST? 

Wow.

No.

I'm sorry but I have to presume that no-one actually buys one of these outright but instead everyone gets them on contract and then kids themselves it's free 'cos they are only paying for data right? I can't judge on this by the way, that's how I'm buying my crappy windows phone - slowly and painfully with a commitment until September 2016 for something that hasn't even got a flash. ( I know I'm banging on about this but it was advertised as having a lumix camera & those are ace- this is not one of those).

So what to do?

Thankfully there is (I hope) a third way. I've just found this site and ordered myself a wifi enabled memory card. According to the site I can just pop this in my standard camera and it will automatically update my cloud account and download things to my other devices. Meaning I can use my phone to instagram photos I take from my normal camera.

I'm pretty chuffed with this idea & will let you know how it works out. - Hopefully it'll mean no more rubbish (quality - I make no promises about the me gurning situation) photos on the blog.

I'll probably pick up a cheap pocket sized camera to carry with me (I love my Nikon but it's too heavy to carry everyday) - does anyone have any suggestions?

All my friends are posers (Day 6, 7,8 & 9)

So I've told you I hate having my photo taken.

I've told you I gurn and move around, and blink, and genuinely actually feel mortified when a camera is pointed at me, yes?

And you are about to say everyone feels like that right? Wrong!

Not my friends, I am somehow friends with the most photo ready gang the world has ever seen. I don't pick 'em 'cos they are photogenic - I'm delighted to say I pick my friends to a one because they are fiercely intelligent, opinionated and can make me snort with laughter.

But weirdly they also are all totally unafraid of cameras and look delicious in every photo ever taken.

So on Thursday I went and hung out with these posers....

Jo (never taken a bad photo in her life) Dowbekin

Laura (fabulous pout) Edwards and Bob (shamelessly cheesy) Cooper. Not only are these guys totally fine with getting their photos taken, but also they are pro's.

Both Laura and Bob work professionally in photography and Jo (alongside the fab work she does with young people) models.

These are 3 of my best friends and I trust them totally. So I asked them to help me with the photo issue.

Here's what they told me:

"Stop bitch talking yourself and the way you look, it just makes you feel uncomfortable, then you look uncomfortable, and then you talk down to yourself some more. Be nice to yourself"

" Stand sideways, look over your shoulder, shoulders back, bum out (anti- instinctive that one), chin forward"

"Don't worry too much about about looking natural, go ahead and pose. Once you're good at posing it'll feel more natural, and will look that way too"

"Delete the crappy ones. It's not dishonest everyone does it!"

Anyway then we had a play, Laura taking the photos, Jo stood behind Laura showing me how to pose, and in less than 2 minutes we had this photo - which I actually bloody like!

 


 I think because I was laughing so much that I stopped being bothered about the camera.

So there you go. Over the next 3 days there were 3 more daily photos - 2 taken by my husband, which I like & felt comfortable in and one taken on Walthamstow market where I was really aware of everyone around me and so felt stupid & look terrified.

So the best advice from my guys I think was the stuff about comfort, - if you're happy it shows!

Here are the other pics

Day 7

Day 8

Day 9

Obviously the photo taking thing is still pretty hideous for me. But genuinely every donation makes me super happy & it'll make a huge difference to families too. Anything you can spare I'll be grateful here's the link 


  

Selfie hatred (Day 5)

I hate having my photo taken. Always have.

My nephew Sam describes me as the anti- Barney Stinson. For those of you that haven't watched 'How I met your mother' this is Barney Stinson.





There is a running joke in the show that you just can't get a bad photo of Barney, whatever he is doing no matter how undignified you take a photo and he looks just like he does above straightening his tie.

And the opposite of that is me. I'm a gawky, clumsy girl who gets very excited about things and moves around a lot. This makes me amusing to be around but it doesn't make for good photos AT ALL. I have lost count of the number of family photos I've ruined by gurning, or doing something weird with my hands, or somehow rolling my eyes back into my head. And I'm not doing it deliberately - I would love to take a good picture but I just don't. 

Here are a couple of examples:
 
 
......and those are ones I allowed myself to be tagged in on facebook! 

I didn't really think about this when I set up this challenge but the act of taking and then posting online photos of me everyday for a year is pretty hideous. 

So I'm going to have to get over this hatred pretty quickly.

Day 2 saw me taking my first ever selfie - this is not a medium I enjoy at all. It's so self regarding, false and entirely set up. It also feels really anti social.  I can see the point if you are recording something, proving a point or asking an opinion - but otherwise go outside, hang around with someone you like and then if you want your photo taken get them to take it. I don't care how pretty you are your mirror does not provide good conversation.

By Day 5 I was on selfie 3

I think you can actually see my soul being sucked out in this. It is just so joyless. So from now on I'm going to try to avoid the selfie & when I am out with people I like, I'm going to get them to take the photos.

I'm also going to learn from a couple of my more photogenic chums how to pose. Something I have never felt motivated to do before and I am sure will look ridiculous at least initially. But there are  360 of these photos to go - so I think for all our sakes I should try.