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

Good News and Bad News for child poverty

Today is my 49th day doing the clothes off my back challenge. If you're a regular reader of the blog you'll remember that it all started with a conversation about capsule wardrobes and child poverty (you can read about it here), and has turned into me following these rules for 49 days so far, and a full year by the time I'm done.

I've been thinking about child poverty even more than usual over the last week for one good and one not so good reason which I'll share with you.

 As is traditional I'll start with the bad news....

Our government has decided to change the way child poverty is measured. And (in my personal opinion) they've got this wrong. 

Our current measure says that a child whose family are living on 60% less than the national average income are living in poverty. Now as a measure it's a bit of a blunt stick as individual families will move above and below that line based on national income without their ability to pay their rent changing one iota. But it does acknowledge that you measure poverty by money.

The government will now measuring the impact & the causes of poverty (impact - attainment of children, causes - families being out of work) - this isn't a bad idea BUT without maintaining an income measure there is a risk that this will shift the debate from poverty to education and back to work programmes. Crucial work to be sure but I don't care how well your teacher/ mentor has prepped you for that exam/ interview, you are not going to perform your best if you enter the room starving hungry.

In my borough (Walthamstow) End Child Poverty estimate that 34% of children are living in poverty. To put it another way 10 children in the average classroom round here are living in families where they struggle to make ends meet. Not struggle to buy designer trainers, a new xbox or holidays. But to heat their homes in winter and keep everyone in the home fed and sheltered. This makes me angry. I spent years of my life doing direct work with families in areas of Sheffield and London where poverty is a real issue. I've worked with children who despite their parents best efforts are inadequately dressed for the weather, come to school bone cold because their house has no heating, or indeed hungry. And much as the rhetoric from our more right wing media would have you believe that this is because their parents are feckless and lazy -  my experience is very different. 

Lots of the families I've known who live in poverty have one or both parents in work (63% of children living in poverty nationally are in a working household), lots of them have children whose care needs are higher than the usual and most of them have cut out the luxuries for themselves before they reluctantly decided that their son or daughters winter coat would need to wait for the next paycheck. These are families like yours, made up of people like you and difference between what they need to spend to keep their heads above water and what they have coming is stark.


Income matters and I'm really worried that we've stopped measuring it.You can read more about why it is important here.

The GOOD NEWS of the week is also about income. Specifically it's about the rights of families of children in hospital to continue to get DLA. You'll remember I've talked about the brilliant Mathieson family before in my post about Dowser Day.


Contact A Family have been campaigning with the Mathieson family against the rule that meant DLA payments stopped when their son Cameron was in hospital for more than 84 days.

On Wednesday the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that this was a violation of his human rights. This is the first time ever that the Supreme Court has found for a claimant in a social security case, and it will be transformational for all those whose children face extended hospital stays. 

I'm not ashamed to say that there were tears and whoops in the Contact A Family offices as this verdict came through - it is brilliant, brilliant news.

It's made it easy to keep plodding on with the clothes of my back challenge this week. I know in the scheme of things that the challenge is a small thing - but the money raised helps Contact A Family to do the big, the exciting, the life changing things. 

And with 41% of families of disabled children telling us they've had to take a loan out to pay for food, there is still a lot of work to be done. Thankyou for your support - as always if you want to Support Contact a Family's work you can do so here.

And here for all you rule checkers are day 47 & 48's #clothesoffmyback photos. No effort at all made to pose in these sorry!

Dowser Day - supporting the Mathiesons court battle

Hello Everyone,

Those of you that follow either me (@edarcherthinks) or Contact A Family (@contactafamily) will have noticed a lot of tweets about Dowser Day recently. You'll have seen lots of photo's of dinosaurs and may have wondered what it is all about.

Over the last few years Contact a Family been supporting the Mathieson family as they fight against the government rule that takes away Disability Living Allowance (DLA) payments from children who spend over 84 days in hospital.

The Mathiesons' son Cameron spent over two years in hospital with cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy when his DLA payments were stopped. The family are currently awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court on their legal challenge to scrap this rule. If they are successful it could mean no other family loses essential financial support when their child spends long periods in hospital.



Sadly Cameron passed away in October 2012, aged five. Every year on his birthday, 19 June, his mum, dad, brothers and sister celebrate his life through Dowser Day, a nod to Cameron's love of dinosaurs.

Cameron's dad Craig Mathieson explains: "Cameron loved everything and everyone in his life and, like many boys his age, he was fascinated with dinosaurs. Because of Cameron's speech delay he couldn't say dinosaur and called them Dowsers instead."

 

One of the reasons I love working for Contact A Family is that the Mathieson's aren't a symbol or a test case for us. Everyone in the organization - including people like me who have never met the family take the situation they were put in by this unfair rule personally.

 

Which meant when we were offered a way to show the family we cared about their loss, and we were grateful for all the effort they are putting in to change this situation for other families by joining in Dowser Day celebrations everyone really threw themselves into it.

 

Here's some of the stuff the team made in our lunchbreaks:

You can find loads more contributions to Dowser Day from staff, families and supporters here and our thankyou video here. People from all over the country got involved. It was brilliant, and no it won't make a difference to the outcome of the court case wether we made a giant dinosaur head or not. But it does make a difference to remember that families of disabled children are families first, and to support and celebrate ordinary family life. 

And it does (to me at least) make a huge difference to work in a charity where everyone really gets that and knows that it is not for us to set an agenda for families but to support them to set their own agenda, get their voices heard and celebrate and protest in a way of their choosing. Contact A Family are really good at what they (we) do, because we are all about families leading the way. Doesn't that sound like the kind of organisation you want to support? As always donating is easy you can do so here.

 

  

How to sell unwanted items on ebay and raise money for Contact A Family

Hey there,

Thank you all so much for the positive messages you've been sending about my challenge and the blog. It's been brilliant to feel so supported.

I realise taking a challenge this extreme is not for everyone, but none the less lots of you have been asking about how you can help. If you want to you can donate here or you could consider getting rid of something you no longer want by selling it on ebay for us.

This post is a detailed step by step guide to listing items for Contact A Family in a way that will raise the most money. I've used clothes as an example but really you can sell anything, got an old bike in your garage? Furniture you no longer love? Selling these things online with ebay's direct donate function is really easy and every penny Contact a Family receives is put to good use.

So here goes

Step 1 - identify the item you want to sell. Clean it up & make it photo ready. While you are doing this note any features or damage someone buying it might want to know about.

Step 2- Take photos. You can load up to 12 photos free, so take detailed close ups as well as photos from as many angles as possible.

Step 3 - Make a cup of tea and boot up your computer. If you've never used ebay before the next stage will take up to 20 minutes, if you are an old hand you can get a listing up in 6.

Step 4- Go to www.ebay.co.uk  If you have an account log in if not you'll have to set one up (there are easy instructions and it's very quick to do) - or use a friend's account.

Step 5 - Along the top of your screen you'll see a 'sell' tab. Click on it. On the top right of the page you have the option to 'switch to advanced tool'. Do this - ebay is going to ask you if you are sure. You are - it's the only way you can automatically donate to charity, so confirm 'switch'.

Step 7 - Fill in a basic title for your item. I typed 'pink jacket'. This helped ebay suggest a category I  could list in. You can choose 1 category for free, and if you want a second it'll cost 35p.

Step 8 - Once you've pressed enter you should be on the real listings page. Your first job here is to revisit your title and make sure that you have as many keywords as possible in it. Keywords are the words people would type to try and find an item. My item title was 'topshop beaded jacket pink blush wedding festival 12 14 #clothesoffmyback'. I included the hashtag so Contact a Family supporters can find everything that is being listed for us, if they want to help out by buying you item & so we can promote your item on social media.

Step 9 - Describe any faults or quirks the item has in the condition box.

Step 10- Upload your photos using the basic photo uploader. Make sure your best photo is on the far left as this will be your cover photo. There are little arrows on the bottom of your uploaded photos that move them left or right use these to give your best photo top billing.

Step 11 - In the details box, describe your item. Talk about it's size (dimensions are especially important for furniture),style and condition. Cut and paste the below text and links into the details box.

I am listing to raise money for Contact A Family. In their 2014 research they found 65% of parents of disabled children go without essentials like clothes in order to provide properly for their children. (The research is here along with the number of families – 33%- who can’t afford to heat their homes). This year a member of our team is raising money by selling all her clothes (except 35 key items) to raise money for Contact a Family to continue their work supporting these families. As a part of this she's challenged people to join in this summer by selling one wedding outfit on ebay for Contact A Family, if you want to get involved you can find the challenge here, and if you want to donate you can do so here.

If not- please bid generously - because this item is gift aided every penny you pay plus 25% extra is donated to Contact a Family. Happy Bidding.

Step 12 -Tab down to choose a format and price for what you are selling. Start as low as you would be prepared to part with the item for, items with a low starting price often end up making more than higher priced items as people become attached with repeat bidding.

Step 13 - Set a start time and duration for the auction. You want your auction to finish on a Sunday evening - that's when items make most money

Step 14 - This is the important one! You'll be asked if you want to donate all or part of the sale to charity, if you don't get offered Contact A Family as an option click select another charity, search for and select Contact a Family. Then you'll be asked what percentage of the sale you want to donate. Obviously I'd suggest 100%.

Step 15 - If you are planning on selling more than one item for Contact A Family Thankyou! You should tick the save this listing box - it'll make listing your next item much quicker!

Step 16 - Confirm your listing.

And you're done!

We can help you promote the things you are selling to raise money for us. If you tweet me @edarcherthinks or Contact a Family @ContactAFamily with a link to your listing we'll try and help you get the word out.

Thankyou for your time and support

Edx

PS here is what my finished listing looked like

  

Second hand is grand (most of the time)

As the youngest of 10 children I know what it is to wear secondhand clothes. I and all my siblings have always been accustomed to passing things between us to get the best wear out of them, and if I am honest I've always quite liked it.

Nothing makes me happier when someone compliments me on an item than to crow 'hand-me-down! My sister/ mum has such good taste'. I wear clothes that belonged to family members when I feel nervous or upset because I find it comforting that someone I love has already worn them. My grandad died when I was a teenager and when my mum asked if there was anything of his I wanted I asked for his gardening shirts. I still wear them regularly.

Of course it wasn't just clothes that were hand me downs. If you wanted to take up hobby or play an instrument and you were in the younger half of the family you'd better hope an older sibling had had the same idea first. My tennis racket- Julya's before mine. The rollerskates - everyones before mine (this didn't worry me much as I was terrified of them). The dolls - well some of those were mine first, but you could tell the ones that had passed through Vanessa's hands because their noses or fingers would be bitten off (she works in a primary school now - which I bet is comforting to all you parents).

And bra's, well bra's are an expensive item - so your first 'passage to womanhood' training bra was bought new from Marks and Spencer, and after that you worked out who in the house was the closest fit to you and got the ones they were done with (Clean is as good as new remember). This wasn't as bad as it sounds - some of my sisters were a fair bit older than me so had jobs and nice stuff so the hand-me -downs were usually good quality. And I was particularly lucky as I was closest to mums size so got her spares, which as I got older moved from the bras that didn't quite work for mums work (where she did a lot of lifting) to, when I left home the underwear dad bought her that there was no way she was wearing. This meant I had nicer (& fruitier) underwear than most girls my age, and didn't buy myself my own bra until I was 22 and had to finally accept that I am bigger than my mum. So I did the logical thing and went up a back size and that is the size I've worn ever since. It's convenient as it's the same size as Julya so if we buy something and don't like it we can swap. No problems.

But what I am coming to is this. I have never been measured for a bra in my adult life. I've read all the articles, and had friends wax lyrical about the wonders of properly fitting underwear and thought, yes, sure - but what kind of idiot doesn't know what size of bra fits.

It turns out an idiot like me. Last week I went shopping for underwear to see me through the challenge.  A certain high street store offers £5 off a bra if you get measured first, so I did. I went down 2 back sizes and up 3 cupsizes! And I've been wearing the wrong size all this time because of hand-me-downs!

Now I find this story funny, I think it reflects how close and ok with each other my family is. But I hesitated putting it up because I also knew that some people don't believe that clean is as good as new, and would just find the whole thing a bit grim. And if that's you then I'm sorry - because here's the thing. My family were broke but we were not living in real actual poverty - it was tight because there were a lot of us but we always went to bed with full stomachs (though I know on occasion my parents didn't). 

Real poverty is worse and 1 in 4 disabled children are living in it, 33% of families with disabled children regularly miss meals. And it's getting worse - Contact a Family's campaigns manager Una Summerson reacted to welfare proposals by saying:


"While benefits relating to the additional costs of disability will be protected, the overall freeze on working-age benefits and tax credits means that families with disabled children will be worse off under proposals set out today in the Welfare Benefits Bill.

"A two year freeze in these benefits means families with disabled children will face a cut in their incomes in real terms.

"This will be worrying news as many families with disabled children have been hit time and again by cuts in recent years. A third have already been affected by social security changes and many are experiencing delays in vital support services for their child. They are not in a position to shoulder anymore."

Every penny you donate makes a difference and you can do so here

Day 4 (or don't judge me.... )

I am still on holiday and am wearing exactly the same clothes as yesterday.I really worried about putting today's photo up because I thought you might judge me.

A big part of what is worrying me is the instagramming thing. The reality is I am happy looking like crap if I think no-one is going to see / judge me. So in the winter I wear some borderline offensive and definitely flammable outfits to walk the dog & then meet my old  stuck-with-me-now-so -don't-care-what-I-look-like friends, down the pub without a second thought. But while I am a long way from vain - the idea of everyone I've ever met seeing regular photo's of me in my fleeced up glory gives me palpitations. Seeing me wearing my 'daytime jammies' is a privilege (potentially I am misusing that word) reserved for the people I love.

 Letting you all see photos of what I wear when I'm not at work or a party worries me.

Partly this is because there is a certain level of agreed etiquette around how we present ourselves to the world that  gives a shorthand about how clean and respectable we are, how well we'll fit in. And changing our clothes is a part of that - it's a shorthand for being clean.

My parents were pretty broke when we were growing up, we wore hand me downs and clothes from charity shops alongside the new clothes they sacrificed things for themselves to get us. "Clean is as good as new" was a bit of a motto in our house. My parents are wonderful so I know that good parenting and providing loads of new clothes is not the same thing at all. There is a huge difference between neglect and poverty - but ask families living on a budget if they feel judged by how they dress their kids and you'll realise how little that difference is appreciated. 

I hate that families living on the breadline feel that their value as parents is measured by how they present their children rather than by how happy their children are. I'm furious about it in fact. But oddly it doesn't stop me from feeling vulnerable to your judgement for wearing the same clothes to walk the dog and hang around my house yesterday as I did today. It doesn't stop me from being terrified that you'll all think less of the work that I do because sometimes I do that work in my scruffs.

I hope you don't. But if you do then please ask yourself whether you want to support families of disabled children to be able to afford to present themselves and their children in the way they'd choose to. Ask yourself if it's ok that 65% of the families Contact a Family spoke to last year are going without new clothes as a result of the very real financial implications of raising a disabled child.

And if you agree that this is not ok - then maybe donate whatever you'd spend on a new t-shirt to Contact a Family - it's easy to do so here

And here is what a wore today (don't judge me)





 

What doesn't a capsule wardobe look like?

This:

Nope that's not all of it - that didn't even fill 1/8 of one of the 4 vacume packs I'm storing stuff in before I sell it.

I did a little audit of what I own before I started packing things away - I didn't include any clothes in the wash, or in the attic or in the chests on top of my wardobe and in the spare room. This is just the stuff I could access easily on the Saturday afternoon I was trying to pack things up.

Here's what I own:

25 t-shirts
20 blouses
6 shirts
5 pairs of jeans
4 pairs of trousers
4 pairs of shorts
15 skirts
26 jumpers
73 dresses
20 cardigans
9 jackets
11 coats
24 pairs of shoes
14 scarves
6 pairs of gloves
5 hats

267 items of clothing before I even go into my (large and overflowing) linen bin.

Surely this is not normal. Particularly when you consider how suprised I was a how low that figure was (then I remembered taking 3 binbags of clothes to the charity shop in February).

I officially have a problem. And as I was vacuum packing up the first batch of clothes I began to feel really anxious. How much of my personality is wrapped up in all these lovely bright items of clothing - will I lose the creative side of my personality? Will people judge me for wearing the same clothes over and over again? Am I going to make myself miserable surviving on 13% of my current wardrobe for the whole year?

Honestly I don't know. But here is what I do know.

Many of the families my charity support don't have the luxury of choosing to do without and the idea of it being a challenge to wear less is laughable when you start to consider poverty on a global scale. So really I'm just going to have to grow up and deal with it.

Because if not having exactly the right thing to wear to that meeting/ lunch/wedding is really the biggest thing I have to worry about this year then really - lets face it I'm blessed. 

 And if you worry about this stuff too - probably so are you. Why not donate what you were about to spend on that top you aren't really sure you'll wear to Contact a Family - you can do so through my just giving page here

The birth of the clothes off my back challenge (or why you shouldn't ask a question you don't want an answer to)

At the end of April I sat with a friend at work and had an entirely selfish whinge. 

I'd just read an article on capsule wardrobes & was fully bought in. No problems at all seeing how a capsule wardrobe was a good thing -for other people. But it couldn't possibly work for me. 

You see I own a lot of clothes – LOADS. I own enough dresses I could wear a different one every day from now until mid august before I had to move onto separates. And then by my calculations I could move around separates (at 2 a day) until well into the new year.

·         

     Yes. I hate how long it takes me to get dressed in the morning. Yes. Most days I feel like I look awful when I leave the house

·   

      But (IMO) capsule wardrobes only work for tall boyish shaped women and models (I am not either of these things)

·          

      And anyway what would I do without vintage? God forbid I look like a clone.

 I am slightly ashamed to say this whinge lasted a good 10 minutes. In my lunchbreak. Working for a charity that campaigns around poverty affecting families of disabled children (www.cafamily.org.uk) . Yes, you are correct I am a selfish, selfish person. In my defence at the end of the 10 minutes I did say “all of which seems trivial compared to the 65% of parents of disabled children we talk to who go without essentials like clothes in order to provide properly for their children”. (I didn’t make that stat up by the way it’s here along with the number of families – 33%- who can’t afford to heat their homes). 

 At this point my friend said something brave, and unexpected and really pissing annoying. She said “ Yes it is trivial. It’d be less trivial if you could find a way to help our families while you are having a meltdown about what to wear to work”. Cowbag. Sometimes I wish I didn’t require my friends to be so honest. 

 But also she was right – could I do something about my chronic shopping habit, feel more stylish and help my organisation to support vulnerable families? 

 It turns out yes. I turn 35 in a week and during my 35 year I will:

• Limit myself to wearing 35 items of clothing (including pairs of shoes, gloves, hats and scarves) for the whole year
• Donate the money I’m not spending on clothes to Contact a Family
• Sell most of my wardrobe on ebay to raise more cash
• Ask friends and family to sponsor me & prove I’m sticking to the rules by instragraming what I wear every day
• Get 35 of my friends to host #clothesoffmyback parties where they ‘buy’ cocktails and trade clothes to help out
• Get my friends and family to gamble on most worn items by sponsoring them per wear
• Blog about it. Not just what I wear, but the reactions of the professionals I work with to seeing me in the same clothes day, after day, after day……

Obviously there it's not going to be that simple - there will need to be rules. But that's for another post......

If you want to sponsor my clothes off my back challenge you can do so here