I Have a Sweater Problem…

…A very big sweater problem. And it’s just a tad out of hand, as you can see.

While I must admit that some things are a little tighter around the middle area than they used to be, I’ve been relatively the same size on top for about a decade now and my taste really hasn’t changed that much. I’ve never been really daring when it comes to trends, so most of the items I go for are pretty classic (or as more than one person has put it “boring”… I like classic better) kinds of styles. As a result, nothing really gets purged unless it shrinks or felts in the dryer.

However, until this new financial situation of mine hit, the buying never stopped. Sweaters ended up stacked and piled three and four deep in the spaces I did have for them, and I still had a horrifying amount left over to shove into storage containers. And as they say, out of sight, out of mind. Every year I end up forgetting what I have and wearing the same 10 sweaters all winter.

And that was okay… when I had the space to store all those sweaters I wore once every few years. I don’t anymore. My closet in this new apartment is literally 1/3 the size of what I’ve had in every other place I’ve lived (that INCLUDES college dorms!), so the massive sweater collection proved to be an even trickier issue to deal with this winter. Basically by January I had resigned myself to the fact that I needed to do a ruthless purge. So as I dragged everything out to put into storage for the spring and summer, I came up with a plan.

First, I took out every sweater I had here and set them all out on the bed, sorted into two piles: those I had worn this winter, and those I hadn’t. The pile of sweaters I’ve worn can be seen above, the unworn below. From there, I sorted the unworn sweaters and took out any I knew for a fact I wasn’t going to wear again – whether that be because they were from my HS days when I preferred my sweaters to be much tighter than I’m comfortable wearing them now, or because they’re just old, pilly, and clearly on their last leg (arm?).

Even after disposing or donating what I knew I could that moment, I was still left with a sizable unworn pile. But at least now I’m down to a collection that fits into the two underbed boxes I use to store my off-season clothing.

The plan is to do more sorting once I pull them back out next winter. When that happens, I will try on each and every sweater; the ones that don’t fit me at the beginning of winter will surely only get worse as I gain my winter weight, and so those will immediately be donated.

Ideally I’ll be left with a collection that’s been pretty much halved, and then from that point on I need to hold myself to a rule of “one for one” – for every sweater I bring in, one’s gotta go. At least until I have that dream home with the giant walk-in closet…

…but I suspect that will always just be a pipe dream.

Are you a sweater junkie like me? If not, what’s your clothing vice?