The year is drawing to a close and for many of us, it’s a time of reflection.   As I did last year, I will publish a series of 2014 wrap-up posts, most of which will actually go live in early January.   I’m going to start my retrospective on a high note, with my best purchases of the past year.

What were your best purchases of the year?

In today’s post, I’ll share a brief overview of my 2014 purchases, followed by a look at what I see as my best buys in various wardrobe categories.   I’ll close out with a list of my top ten closet acquisitions of the year.   Later this week, I’ll delve into the darker side of things – my worst 2014 purchases, as well as those items for which the proverbial jury is still out.   Since over two-thirds of my purchases were made in the second half of the year and many were for the late to arrive cooler weather, I’m not yet able to appropriately classify everything as either “good” or “bad.”

2014 Purchase Overview

But that’s a subject for my next post – on to today’s topic!   Let’s start with an overview…  I have added 55 items to my closet this year.  Several gifts are included within this number.   Items that were returned for refunds don’t count, but things that were passed on for donation or consignment do.

Because I still made a fair number of returns this year, I’ve had trouble keeping track of my item number.   In fact, as I tried to round up all of the stats for this post, my head started to spin.  So let’s just say that I exceeded my initial item limit of 38 (set forth in this post) by quite a bit and either met or came close to my revised item limit of 53 (written about here).   I had too many exclusions and caveats anyway, so I definitely understand why some of you got confused by the whole thing.  Even I am confused, so let’s just look at the items and not get into semantics of limits for the sake of this discussion.

Continue reading →