No-new-clothes challenge -- Spring Review

I have now gone 5 months following the rules of the 1-year-no-new-clothes challenge. Spring is always a difficult season for resisting the temptations of bright new clothes, and at the start of the season, I attempted to combat this temptation by pulling out as many brightly-colored, uniquely-printed pieces of clothing from storage as I could find and stuffing my closet to the brim. All those options ended up being too much, however; and toward the end of the season, I found myself reaching for simple, much-loved basics -- a trend I am sure will grow as the weather gets warmer and I can be less dependent on layering. Here's the season in review:

Bohemian Spring Break:

Spring Outfits based on TV shows:

1: Inspired by Downton Abbey; 2 & 3: Inspired by Mad Men

Successful Clothing Hacks:

See the tutorial here.

Using scarves as clothes, here.

Not-so-successful clothing hack:

The failed white pants experiment.

Most worn piece: 

Favorite Outfits (that I remembered to record):

I never blogged about the outfit on the end, but I wore some variation of this ensemble (usually with a change in the jewelry or footwear) several times this spring.

Moment of Greatest Temptation: The birthday gift cards incident. 

(BTW, only one person responded to my query about whether or not wearing the birthday pajamas as real clothes would count as cheating. That person said that the question was already answered in that the explicitly stated purpose of my birthday gift cards was to buy new clothes, so it should fall under the "gift" category of the no-new-clothes exceptions. At any rate, you'll be seeing me mix in at least one of those pajama pieces as "real" clothes.)

Summer style forecast: Great basics with bright colors mixed in, kind of like what I wore on mother's day:

The challenge definitely gets more difficult as the weather gets warmer. It's easy to remix pieces into lovely layered ensembles when the weather is cool or mild, but when the temperatures rise to Texas Summer levels, the individual clothing pieces have to stand on their own without layering. As I began to unpack my summer clothes, searching for those perfect basics, I discovered stains, holes, and poor fit in some of my most important summer pieces. So I used my Gap gift card, leftover from Christmas, to update a couple of basics, in keeping with the challenge rules. I'll be sure to write about that and how I plan to wear these basics as we move into summer. 

In the meantime,