Six items or less - Moving forward

So as I mentioned in my last post I have just finished a month of the six items or less challenge. Now what? Well first off the great thing about doing challenges like this is that it proves to yourself that you can do it and that its really not that bad.

When trying to live a more sustainable way of life it is incredibly easy to get to overwhelmed and give up before even starting. Secondly, a lot of the arguments against living more sustainable is that somehow our quality of life will be lessened by doing it.

What tends to happen when people take challenges like the six items or less is that they realize that its really not that hard and in many cases people report feeling like their quality of life had improved.

For myself I did not notice much of a change one way or another. Really this was due to the fact that the challenge was only one month and that I had already committed myself to consuming less in general. But by choosing to do the challenge and completing it I was able to prove to myself that six items or less was something I could do long term.

Plus one big quality of life improvement that came out of all this is that my closet has a lot less items in it. To me this is just awesome! More after the break.
Moving forward I am going to keep in the spirit of six items or less. Does this mean I am only going to have six items or less in my closet? Nope, but I won't be needing a walk in closet just to have room for my clothes.

After the challenge was over I bought a couple new clothes: A new T-Shirt, long sleeve button up shirt and a sweater. Big shopping trip I know ;)

These items are going to be combined with a nice long sleeve button up fair trade shirt from a local shop, a organic t-shirt that I got as a birthday present from my parents, a old (but still good!) cotton t-shirt a blue/white long sleeve button up shirt and a old but again good sweater.

So thats 3 button up shirts, 3 t-shirts and 2 sweaters. Add two pairs of jeans and a pair of nice work pants and you end up with 11 clothing items not counting socks and such. Not bad for a years worth of clothes.

The reason I choose these items is that they are versatile. First, I made sure that their colors while different were similar enough that I could mix and match easily to create different outfits. Second, I can roll up the sleeves on the button up shirts to make them short sleeve and either have them buttoned or not depending on the weather. This allows me to essentially change my style without having to own additional items. It also lets me adjust my outfit for the weather again without additional items.

So there you have it. Moving forward my main lesson from the challenge was to have a smaller number of more versatile clothes instead of many single use items.