Hello, dear readers, and happy Friday! I’m always happy to see a Friday roll around, but I was especially happy for this one – I’ve completed my coursework here at Fort Lee! Yep, the six weeks of training just flew by, and while you’re reading this post, Scott and I are out of here! Adventure awaits, and I’m so excited to get underway on this next leg of our journey west!
For just about the whole time I’ve had this blog, I’ve done a Friday Style post. I love fashion. It’s wearable art. It’s part of your own personal advertising for yourself and your personality. And it’s a venue for endless creativity! I started doing these posts in an effort to break out of my outfit-of-the-day rut and today, I’m attacking an additional challenge. After seeing Alison’s great designs, and the other lovely ladies who linked up with her, I’m trying the 7×7 challenge. You get seven pieces, you make seven outfits. You stretch your creativity, and you get more out of your wardrobe.
These are the seven pieces I chose:
Gold Shirt | Black Shirt {similar} | Pink Shirt {similar} | Blue Cami {DKNY Jeans – had forever} | White Shorts | Denim Skirt {again, had forever} | Khaki Pants
I made six outfits. I’m pretty sure I could have gotten a seventh out of these – or an eighth or a ninth – but they looked too much like repeats of each other. So…here you go!
The combos are in order:
- Black shirt + blue cami + white shorts
- Gold shirt + white shorts
- Black shirt + gold shirt + denim skirt
- Blue cami + denim skirt
- Pink shirt + white shorts
- Blue cami + khaki pants
This all may seem fairly straightforward, but I learned a lot from trying out this challenge, and from making myself pose in front of a camera for this challenge, a lot about body image, picking out clothes, and what works and doesn’t work for me.
1. Pack versatile clothes and A LOT of accessories. The right mix-up of accessories and layers can totally change a look. Oh, and I do have more bags and shoes with me than this – I was just trying to stick to the basics for this one. I’m still kind of amazed at all the combos I got from just a few things.
2. I have more options than I thought. I figured out some new combos I want to try, ways to dress up and dress down certain pieces I have, and a few different ways to style my now-really-short hair! And those white shorts are my favorite thing now. I never thought I’d own white shorts, let alone love my white shorts.
3. The right shoes make all the difference. I was looking for versatile warm-weather outfits, so sandals were the order of the day, but when you’ve got sprinter’s legs, which are not skinny even when you are (which I’m not right now), going from flats to a two-inch wedge makes a huge difference.
4. I am not skinny. On the subject of having those sprinter’s legs and that extra lining, even when I am skinny, I’m not skinny. I hope that makes some kind of coherent sense. Anyway, having some shape to your shape isn’t a bad thing, but I know I’m going to be happier and I’m going to look better if I pick out clothes based on that, clothes that are going to look good on me and not the skinny girl outfits I usually put together on Polyvore. There were a lot of design-worthy outfits that failed the KC body test.
5. Posing is tough! You’re only seeing a minute portion of the pictures I took. I probably took a hundred pictures when I tried on my first outfit just because I hated all of them. But I learned a lot about posture, angles, body language, and trying to get a genuine smile in there. It was really tempting just to grab a couple okay ones and throw them into Photoshop, but that wasn’t the point of this exercise.
All in all, this challenge gave me some ideas, some confidence, some good lesson, and a little bit of a self-image adjustment. I have to give a major shout-out to Alison for her inspiration, and while I will never be able to rock the amazing outfits she does, I’m going to keep trying to find what works for me!
Do you have any styling, sizing, selection, or posing tips to share? Lord knows I can use all the help on this I can get, so I’d love to hear from you! Happy weekend!
