Between the generous bags of hand-me-downs from friends, and the clothes that I make, my kids wardrobes were getting overrun with clothes. Despite this, the kids never seemed to be able to find/put together a respectable outfit.

I love my kids (4 and 6 years) having their independence, and being able to express themselves through what they wear, but I was tired of them looking as though they got dressed in the dark from a charity bin.

The answer, I decided, was to cull their wardrobes down to a manageable amount of pieces that all go together – A ‘capsule wardrobe’ if you will.

Here is what I came up with for my 4 year old:

 

As this is a sewing blog, I thought I best include a note about the sewing side of things. Of the 16 pieces I included in this capsule; I sewed 10 of them, one was a gift, one was a hand-me-down, 3 were purchased from K-mart and 1 was purchased from Target. I am already regretting the pieces purchased from K-mart which are warped and stretched after a couple of wears. The cardigan from Target is in good condition, despite being on regular rotation, and into it’s second season. I have included links to where you can find the patterns for the pieces I made in the list below.

The pieces (from the top):

1. Basic floral blouse sewn from a vintage sheet (no pattern on this one sorry)
2. Navy t-shirt with a gathered neckline detail (a hand-me-down from a friend)
3. Long sleeve cream and black stripe t-shirt from K-mart
4. Long sleeve navy t-shirt from K-mart
5. Long sleeve pink t-shirt from K-mart
6. Black and white stripe capri leggings (made from our Patterns-for-pennies Legging pattern)
7. An elastic waist skirt made from a vintage sheet (a good tutorial for making one of these)
8. Navy full length leggings (made from our Patterns-for-pennies Legging Pattern)
9. Pink knit circle skirt (made from our #106 Skort pattern without the shorts)
10. Pink capri leggings (made from our Patterns-for-pennies Legging Pattern)
11. Teal dress (This is the Josephine dress by Bella Sunshine designs for One Thimble)
12. Navy suspender skirt (made for my daughter by a gorgeous friend of mine)
13. Grey Jumper dress (made with our #113 Romper pattern with the Free skirt add on)
14. A magenta tunic dress in heavy weight woven fabric(this was self drafted so no pattern to share here sorry)
15. A pink knitted cardigan from Target with bow pockets
16. A cream knit v-neck cardigan (made from our #116 cardigan pattern currently exclusive to One Thimble)

 

I have put together some example outfit combos (there are easily double this number of options), but before we get to far into it, there are a few things you might notice about this wardrobe:

• This is an Autumn/Winter capsule for us (in Brisbane Australia), but I am well aware that this would serve as a Spring/Summer wardrobe if you lived somewhere colder.
• There are no pants/tops outfits listed – my daughter refuses to wear pants without a skirt – this is not for lack of trying on my part, but there you go. If you were to include skirt-free outfits you would have even more options.
• There is a lot of pink – this is not because I think little girls should wear pink – pink, however is what she wants to wear, so I have gone with her on that one.

 

 

I am loving this solution. Little H always (well almost) looks cute and put together, and she still gets to wear all the pink and twirly skirts that she loves. The only drawback, is that you really have to make sure that you are on top of the washing!

There are a few great blog posts that I found really helpful in putting this together:

For great basics and ‘rules’ for creating an effective minimalist kids capsule wardrobe a read of this great post from simplefamilies.com will get you on your way. The only thing in this post that didn’t suit us was that the collections were all solids and that we thought that we really needed just a few more pieces.

This awesome post from Love Lake Living had me sorted on how to handle prints and patterns in a capsule wardrobe.

If you are wanting to get a capsule wardrobe going for your little one, but are not so keen on limiting the wardrobe to so few pieces you will love this post from The Little Things We Do. She goes through the process of cleaning out the current wardrobe and then adding pieces to tie what is left together for a cohesive look.

 

So there you go – a capsule wardrobe for the kiddo. I will leave you with a few shots of little H modeling some of the pieces – what a cutie 🙂

Thanks for reading
Liz xx