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Moving from conspicuous to conscious consumption and doing reviews along the way.  Find plenty of unsponsored reviews of Quince, Everlane, Grana, and Cuyana on the site!  I'm working towards a minimal waste lifestyle, and oh yea I love bags >.<

Shopping ban update for March

{Squeezing this update in between my Spring 10x10 challenge here since by the time the challenge is over we'll be deep into April}

So I did it!  I managed to go without anything new for one month.  I guess I kept myself busy with my back-log of reviews that needed to be done and I just told myself, "Ok, you gotta be able to at least go one month."  So no thrift shopping and no purchases on credit from Everlane or Grana.  But April 1st, I was itching to go back to my old ways and I allowed myself to try some new things from Everlane (their dipped tote and their modern loafer slides--still waiting for these to come in and to be honest I'm really just curious about slides but I'm pretty sure they'll be too narrow for my feet).  But in the end I'm glad I waited a month since it really clarified what I wanted from Everlane and Grana when the temporary ban was over (I also repurchased Grana's linen boyfriend shirt since I seem to have lost my first one--I can't find it for the life of me, and now that summer is rolling around I really want a good linen shirt in my life).  I'm also itching to go thrift shopping but I'm waiting until I absolutely feel like I need to go shopping and then I'm going to treat myself.  But I've realized that by at least waiting it really helped me to be more selective when it did come time to try some new things.  I'm going to let myself celebrate this small victory but like any addict, I can't get too relaxed and let myself fall back to old habits.  Also the capsule closet is helping in that whenever I want something fresh in my closet, I 'shop' my storage bins and add something new.  But for the most part nothing new has been added to my capsule either.  Let's hope I can keep this slow and conscious consumption going through April.  In the meantime, here is my current list of things I want to buy if I were not on a ban:

My lust for these hand-made shoes are still going strong: The Sandy from Sevilla Smith

the numero un bag from Polene (a french brand I just discovered); I emailed them to ask them a little more about their manufacturing process and I'm happy to report that they "only make our bags in Spain in the famous town of Ubrique and all the workers in the factories are well paid. This is a town with a high level of social protection for them because most of the peoples are working in this industry."  Coincidentally this is also where Everlane makes their leather foldover crossbody which I loooove (the leather is so yummy).  I really want to try this bag out (would readers be down if I did a one-in-one out policy for my bags so I can experiment with this bag and report back?  Or is that breaking the ban? lol).

And Polene's numero trois bag