As promised, here’s one last follow-up on my Chicago (ORD) travel wardrobe experience— but this time, it’s all about my mother! It was her trip, after all; I just accompanied her to help with driving, etc., so I really can’t finish up my post-trip reports without covering at least a little of her experience!
Note: If you’d like to get caught up on this whole experience, there’s a list of links at the end of this post.
Silly of me, but I just didn’t think to take pictures specifically of Mom’s travel wardrobe while we were together on this trip, but at least I have some photos of her during various activities and events. (We live in different states.) And she’s been kind enough to send me a list of what she packed, with notes on what she’d do differently next time, so we should be able to get an overall sense of her experience, clothes-wise.
In my first follow-up report on my Chicago (ORD) travel wardrobe, I told you about a last-minute fix for a minor packing-related emergency. Now I want to get on to the follow-up proper, starting with showing you exactly what I took with me; as you’ll see, I made some switches from my original plan. I’ll show my outfits, in the order (ORDer?) in which I wore them, and also with details about what I wore them to do. (Just so this post won’t swell to epic proportions, I’ll split this part of my report into 2-3 posts, each covering a few days of my 8-day trip.)
Aside: I should tell you that the reason for my trip was to accompany my mother (after meeting her at the airport in Chicago) through 8 days of driving around a fairly big area of Illinois. I did all the driving, and basically acted as a personal assistant. However, other than my mom’s 60th high school reunion, I had no idea what types of events I’d need to dress for; all I knew was that we were going to spend a lot of time driving, alternated with visiting Mom’s relatives and family friends (most of whom I hadn’t seen for literally decades). I did have some idea of what to expect weather-wise, having lived in Ohio for almost 25 years before moving back to the Pacific Northwest (in a nutshell, humidity and mosquitoes). Since I was really just guessing as to what clothes I would need, I decided the best approach was to make each piece as versatile as possible, namely, separates, coordinated through the development of my wardrobe color palette. End of aside.
Before I flew off to the Great Midwest, this was my wardrobe plan:
Travel wardrobe (theoretical). Clockwise from left: knit/sequin dress, turquoise wedges, chartreuse silk scarf, print jersey top, hand-knitted cotton cowl, asymmetrical bamboo jersey top, charcoal-grey jersey top, green necklace/bracelet, green pumps, chartreuse/teal/aqua kimono sweater, turquoise necklace, fancy earrings, linen tuxedo-striped trousers, flat ankle-tie sandals, cropped jeans, multi-color flat sandals. However…
This week on Makeover Monday, I showed you how I started with my turquoise necklace, then added various fabrics to it to build a color palette for my ORD (Chicago) trip coming up next week. Now I want to quickly follow up by showing how you can do the same thing (whether you sew or not), simply by pulling things out of your closet.
Once again, here’s my new palette:
My new ORDer palette. (I created this palette at ColourLovers.com; click the palette to see it there!)
Changing Your Clothes 