As part of my effort to reorganize my belongings to make room in my apartment for the contents of my sewing studio, I have come to the re-realization that I own too many clothes. It's a re-realization because this happens to me at least once a year, if not once every season. I go through all of my clothes and make three piles:

• Clothes to keep
• Clothes to toss, and
• "maybe" clothes to hold on to until the next time.

The idea behind the maybe pile is that they are things so awesome I should wear them, I just forgot I owned them, and that if they haven't been worn by the next go-around, then they head to the toss pile. The toss pile also has its own breakdown. There are

• clothes to rework into something else
• clothes to hang onto until the next clothing swap (too nice to cut up, not nice enough for resale)
• clothes to consign (normally this never makes it out of the house since I have no car and just ends up moving from pile to pile over the years)
  

This time however I am planning to consign everything at the Green Closet for a bunch of reasons not the least of which being that Xmas is amazing, her store is awesome, and I seem to make it over there about once a week. She's got a policy of preferring not to take anything from the Gap, Charlotte Russe, Old Navy etc which is understandable because damn near everything they sell is poor quality, made in China, and cheap as hell anyway, so it doesn't really hold any resale value. I realized as I was sorting that

• I buy WAY too much stuff at Charlotte Russe!
• I have a weakness for GAP clearance ("It's $1.99, how can I not buy it?")
• I would be slightly embarrassed to show up at a clothing swap with near obscene amounts of the above two retailers' merchandise

Eliminating the clothing swap and consignment options leaves me no choice but to reconstruct it all, and I'm hesitant to spent a lot of time remaking something that will most likely not last very long - I like to reserve the best quality fabrics for reconstructing. So what to do?

Well, I came up with something that I think just might work - "lite" reconstruction/embellishment. I've got this great Alexander Henry fabric that's all skulls and roses, and while it is awesome to look at, I've had a hard time coming up with something you could make with it to wear that wouldn't look like you just waltzed out from a shopping spree at the World's Worst Craft Fair. What if I used the skull and rose motifs as applique? Sort of an Anna Sui vibe like this dress:

It can be my diffusion line!