In my 2020 “sewing goals” blog post, I wrote about how I wanted to spend this year sewing less, sewing better and sewing smarter.

Sounds pretty sensible, right?

One thing I was curious about was whether there are any online tools available which might help me with the ‘sew smarter’ aspect of things.

To me, sewing smarter really means developing a better understanding of how to sew clothes I will wear for years to come.

One recommendation I received in comments to that post was the Stylebook app, so I decided to give it a try.

The Stylebook app is a paid app (costs EUR 4.49 at time of writing) for iOS devices. It touts itself as a “closet assistant”, helping you to curate your closet and create outfits, plans and obtain statistics of use and wear.

Now, there was once a time where I would NEVER in a million years have thought I would do something like use an app to track my clothing wear. That seemed too Clueless-esque and not at all something anyone did in real life.

Buuuut, ever since I took the time to do The Curated Closet last year, I’ve been amazed at how much better I’ve been feeling about my sewing and style. Which has actually left me convinced that since I devote so much time to sewing my own clothes, I should probably devote a bit more time to making sure I’m confident in my knowledge of what I ought to be sewing.

Thus, my openess to giving the Stylebook app a whirl.

Now, as of the time of writing, according to the app, I’ve been recording my daily outfits in Stylebook for about two months, so I thought that was enough to offer a ‘first impression’ idea of what Stylebook can offer to meet the needs of sewists.

So what can you do with Stylebook?

For me, I have found the Stylebook app useful in providing insights into two key areas: the overall content of my wardrobe and what it is that I’m wearing on a daily basis. In relation to the latter, I’m still at the beginning of my journey and hope there’ll be plenty more insight over time!

The basic principle is that you enter your entire wardrobe into the Stylebook app. Then you can use the app to create ‘looks’, plan outfits and record what you are actually wearing. You end up with a database of your wardrobe which you can search (e.g. what items in my wardrobe are made of linen? what do I have which is white? etc). If you record your outfits daily, you can also check any garment and see how often you actually wear it.

You can create and duplicate outfits (called ‘looks’) and keep a record of them in various categories (e.g. work looks, day looks, casual looks – these categories are all customisable). Each ‘look’ can include as many garments as you wish and you can also draw in things like inspiration photos from the web. See here my exercise in narcissism as I draw in images from my own blog in this outfit based on my Myosotis dress!

There is also a really useful ‘Packing’ section, which is great for planning what you want to wear on a trip and creating a packable list. This function would also be useful for things like capsule wardrobe challenges or if you wanted to plan out your Me Made May.

Here’s my travel wardrobe from my recent trip to Australia:

What I have found most useful so far is the way that the data can has provided me insight into my overall wardrobe content – not just what I’m wearing. For example, the most common fabric in my wardrobe is cotton (14.6%), followed (to my surprise, as I would have thought it would be first) by linen (13.4%), then it’s a tie between wool and viscose (both at 7.9%).

This overall wardrobe insight is useful for broader questions to like ‘do they colours in my wardrobe reflect the colour palette I want to be wearing?’.

In my case, I’m feeling pretty chuffed that the answer seems to be, more-or-less, yes!

Whilst I’ve created a few ‘looks’ in the app, it’s not really the main draw for me. Unfortunately my life right now just doesn’t give me enough time to spend on my phone creating outfits – I’d rather use that time sewing or sewing what you guys are all sewing on instagram!

Another thing you can do with the app is import a garment that you are thinking of purchasing and create some looks to see how it integrated with your existing wardrobe. I think this is a really fun thing to play around with but its use for sewists is limited to seeing how RTW purchased might work with our existing me-mades, since we can’t exactly import images of items that live only in our minds!

Getting started on Stylebook

I’m not going to lie, getting your wardrobe into the Stylebook app so that you can start recording your outifts and creating ‘looks’ is not for the light hearted.

Especially for sewists!

The Stylebook app actually works best (i.e. in fastest) if you can pull images from the internet already – which is actually pretty simple and painless. Luckily I was able to do this for a lot of my non me-made items, including shoes which are, for me, particularly difficult to photograph.

Buuuuuut, the joys of having a ‘one of a kind’ wardrobe as a sewist is that we can’t just pull images of our clothing from elsewhere. Which means you have to photograph every single item of me-made clothing in flat lay and manually enter them into the Stylebook app.

I’m not going to lie – it’s a big old time investment.

Me, I was undertaking this project in January in a dark and dreary Northern European country. This time of year my apartment has poor lighting and I simply don’t have the space or facilities to create proper ‘flat-lay’ photography conditions.

Plus try telling a 4 year-old, sorry, Mama can’t play with you right now because she’s taking photos of her clothes! That’s just not going to work.

I actually found it so complex to get a good flat-lay shot of my clothes that I started to just use my blog photos of me already wearing the clothes instead.

Doing this means that the Stylebook app cannot distinguish very well between your item of clothing and the background. Which leaves you going through a manual process of basically drawing a line around the item of clothing on your screen and then ‘erasing’ all the background. I also found, however, that unless you have great lighting and background conditions, even my few attempts at flat lays were so less than ideal that I still had to manually draw a ‘border’ around my clothing anyway, so both using blog photos and poorly done flat lays led to the same result.

It was this manual preparation of the images for entry into the Stylebook app which was time consuming.

If you actually have a flair for flat lays or proper lighting available to you, I imagine it would all be much, much faster! Also, the Stylebook App blog does also have a bunch of helpful blog posts to help you with these ‘set up steps’. So it’s definitely not an insurmountable task, but I just wanted to forewarn anyone who might be interested that it’s not something you can accomplish in an afternoon either!!

An alternative approach to entering photos into Stylebook…

Now, I very quickly realised that if I didn’t approach the task of entering my wardrobe into the Stylebook app in a reasonable way, I would rapidly become so overwhelmed that I would give up. So I chose to take a ‘slowly but surely approach’.

Each day my aim would be to ensure that my outfit that day, plus 5 additional items, had been entered into the app. In this way, over the course of several weeks, I slowly got my wardrobe into Stylebook.

The amount of time that it takes to get started does make you feel pretty invested in the platform. I couldn’t contemplate lightly deciding to ‘try’ another option anytime soon.

I also want to advocate for my unconventional method of putting photos of myself wearing the garments into the Stylebook App. Now, I’m the first to admit that my images are a bit rough and ready. Nowhere near professional quality.

But, it looks like ME! And like it’s a garment actually being worn.

When I make up outfits, they look like I do.

If I were to pull off size XS stock images of clothing from the internet and put them in the app, that wouldn’t necessarily have any correlation to how a garment looks on my unique body.

Plus, I find that items photographed in flat lay look extremely undynamic (at least with my lack of photography skills), kind of reminding me of chalk outlines of dead bodies. This ‘look’ for example, is made up of entirely flat laid clothes and, well, it just looks weird to me:

Using photos of garments already on your own body is also really useful for layering items. I can cut out an image of how a jacket or coat actually looks on me when worn and drape it onto outfits. Whereas if I just pull that imagine from a flat lay online, it is usually a closed jacket that doesn’t really reflect on it looks on my body.

See what I mean, here is a jacket in flat lay added to an outfit:

But here is what it looks like when I crop out an image of me actually wearing my Sienna maker jacket – so much easier to create a realistic image of an ‘outfit’:

Plus, the fact that I have so many blog photos already, made it much easier to do it this way.

All of which is to say that while my method of getting my clothinginto the app is a bit unconventional, I don’t think it’s actually terrible! Especially for bloggers or anyone who already has the images in existence.

Tips for using the Stylebook app from a sewist perspective

There’s definitely a few things I realised while setting up the Stylebook app which I think are useful to keep in mind as a sewist.

With each garment you enter into the Stylebook app, there are pre-existing meta-data fields like brand, colour, fabric, price, for you to fill in. If you wish, of course, no field is compulsory and you can skip anything at all. There is also a ‘Notes’ section where you can add any additional information. That notes section is searchable.

I found some of the included data sets a bit useless for my personal needs – like the one about whether the garments are ‘available’, at the tailors, at the dry cleaners, at the laundry etc.

Yeah, my wardrobe isn’t sufficiently active to require its own ‘status’ field!!!!

The main thing is to think about what your data needs are. What kind of information do you want to be searchable in the Stylebook app in the future? Anything you want to be able to search, you have to make sure you systematically include in the ‘ Notes’ section of each entry. For example, I always included the name of the pattern, the pattern company, the fact that it was ‘me-made’ and the date at which I sewed the item. Now I know that if I search any given year in the future, I will get a list of every garment which I sewed that year.

For example, here is what I included in the ‘Notes’ section of my Saraste Dress:

I actually initially started out by entering the indie pattern company into the pre-set ‘brand’ metadata field. But I quickly abandoned this because I realised that what I wanted to see most of all was the overall percentage of my wardrobe which was me-made. This is not going to be visible if my data includes just a bunch of individual indie sewing patterns listed as ‘brands’. Instead, I use the brand ‘me-made’ which I applied for anything sewn or knitted, then I used the Notes section to be able to add more details about pattern and pattern company.

Another lesson learned was to think about the level of specificity with which I wanted to record information. For example, the field of ‘Fabric’ – a pretty important one for sewists. I initially started off being really specific here. I was entering things like ‘viscose/lurex blend’, ‘wool/mohair/acrylic’ etc.

But this wasn’t very effective at painting an overall picture of my wardrobe fibre content because it was too specific that I just ended up with dozens of fabrics registering as being entirely unique. I then switched to choosing the dominant fabric to categorise the garment (e.g. simply ‘ wool’, ‘linen’, ‘viscose’, even if it was actually a blend, or using ‘jersey’ regardless of whether it was cotton jersey, modal jersey, merino jersey, bamboo jersey). I then included all the more specific details in the ‘Notes’ section for each garment. This vastly improved the overall picture available to me of what fabrics are in my wardrobe as a statistical overview, while still keeping more detailed information available.

But how much does a me-made garment cost??

Another thing to think about if you are starting with the Stylebook app as a sewists is how you calculate the ‘cost’ of your me-made garments. By adding the cost of garment into the Stylebook app, you are able to get statistics on the Cost-Per-Wear over time.

Personally, I’m really interested to see how cost-per-wear pans out over time. Is it worth splurging on that expensive fabric? Will I wear the garment enough to justify it…

But it’s not necessarily simple to calculate how much a sewing project cost you. Fabric cost, easy. Pattern cost, fine. Zippers, buttons, no problem. But what about your labour? What about the cost of your sewing machine and permanent equipment? Did you remember to add in the thread? What about the shipping costs for the online fabric order, divided evenly amongst all the fabric in that order?? There’s a great blog post over on Wanderstitch about precisely this issue.

If you want accurate Cost-Per-Wear statistics, it’s perhaps important to think about what you would want to include in your calculation of costs and make sure you do it consistently. For me, since I conceptualise sewing still as being primarily as a hobby for joy and satisfaction rather than being about the finished garment itself, I’m happy to ‘write off’ the labour costs. It’s just time I would otherwise have spent vegging out in front of the TV!

So I just include raw material costs, but even that sometimes requires more paying attention than you might imagine. I’ve also decided to only start including cost information for new wardrobe items because I want it to be accurate.

But my decision to calculate costs in this way, means that I am underestimating the real cost of my me-made wardrobe and it’s something I need to keep in mind when I compare cost data to RTW items in my wardrobe.

Lessons from using the Stylebook app

So, what have I learned in my first couple of months of using the Stylebook app?

Keeping in mind that the entire point of the exercise was to try to facilitate sewing smarter?

The main lesson was that my wardrobe is huuuuuuge. Much bigger than I thought it was. Sufficiently enormous that I’m too ashamed to share an exact number here!!

It wasn’t so much the garments which did it (I had a pretty accurate idea of what was in there in this regard) but the inclusion of items that I don’t really conceptualise as being part of my wardrobe, nor devote a whole lot of thought to.

I’m talking about things like bags, jewelry, scarves, hats, sunglasses, shoes.

When I see it like that, well, yeah, duh, they are part of the wardrobe.

But before having to document them all, I really thought of these things as being ‘extras’, rather than as integral wardrobe components. And it was in these extra categories that I was amazed at how quickly things could add up. For example, even though I have only 2 necklaces that I wear with any degree of frequency, I technically own about a dozen of them. Same thing for lightweight scarves.

But this broader conceptualisation of the scope of my wardrobe has also had an impact on just how ‘me-made’ my wardrobe is. Before starting this exercise, I would probably have estimated that my wardrobe is about 80% me-made.

According to the Stylebook app, that number is actually only 56%. And it is, again, these extras which account for that.

For example, in my mind, I imagine that when I wear a me-made jumpsuit or dress, I am head-to-toe, 100% me-made. But once I add a pair of shoes, a bag and outerwear for heading out into the rain, statistically the outfit is actually only 25% me-made. Even though to me, it still feels, well, way more me-made than that!

Still, I’m not actually ‘disappointed’ that my wardrobe is only 56%, as I now have a better understanding of just how much is included in the notion of ‘wardrobe’.

I think this awareness will be useful. It has already made me more aware that if I want to feel confident in an overall look, I should probably pay more attention to things like, which coat, scarf and hat will look good with a garment.

In other words, using Stylebook has encouraged me to think more about what will my garments actually look like on me when I leave my home on a rainy morning, rather than what they look like when I take a photo for instagram!!

Indeed, the one thing that has surprised me is that the wardrobe items I wear most aren’t my ‘garments’ at all. It’s my bag or my coat or my wool beanie or a pair of shoes that I’m actually wearing day in and day out. So I am committed to paying a bit more attention to these ‘small players’ in my wardrobe which aren’t actually as small as I think!

Get on top!

There was also another major surprise for me.

In my wardrobe, the ‘category’ of clothing that I feel most dissatisfied with is definitely ‘tops’. I know that’s a big category, so let me explain. I have a lot of sweaters that I love and am really happy with (and luckily I love to wear sweaters), so that’s the one little sub-category which is doing fine.

But, beyond those lovely sweaters, I feel that I struggle to buy or sew tops that I actually wear. I love button-up shirts and own, ummm, 20 of them, only 5 of which are me-made. Yet, I very rarely actually wear any of them and I’m not sure why.

So I have long felt that ‘tops’ are a weak area of my wardrobe. Yet, to my shock it was the area of my wardrobe which actually had the MOST items!! Yet, I still feel totally inadequate in this department.

Which provided me with what I think may prove to be an important insight. The area where I am most uncertain of what I want and like is the area in which I over-consume the most.

Makes sense when you think of it like that.

The problem certainly isn’t that ‘I have no tops to wear’. I have statistical proof of that!! The problem is that I don’t know which kind of tops I like to wear and which ones are sufficiently versatile and comfortable that I will wear them regularly.

That’s the ‘sew smarter’ problem which needs to be addessed!

Other lessons so far…

Documenting my wardrobe also confirmed several things I already suspected.

Like that my heart is forever stuck in summer and I own way more summer garments than winter despite the necessities of my current climate situation in the Netherlands.

I realised, for example, that I have NINE me-made shirt dresses.

I have always found a good shirt dress irresistible.

And, in addition to those shirt dresses, I have a further 16 summer dresses. So basically, I could wear each garment once over the course of a Dutch summer – at best!!

And that doesn’t even include the jumpsuit count!!

Another thing I was pleased to see is that I actually own very few clothes which I would consider to be ‘Work’ clothes only. Perhaps my Utu Pinafore is really the only garment I found which clearly fits in that category.

Everything else is more flexible and can be worn both to work and day-to-day, so I’m definitely happy to have that degree of flexibility.

The other thing that surprised me is that most of my wardrobe dates from the past several years only.

My oldest garment is a RTW leather jacket that’s about 9 years old. My oldest me-made garment is a silk Sewaholic Saltspring dress, sewn in around 2013. But the vast majority of garments are much younger.

In other words, it is kind of the opposite of the very classic and long-lasting wardrobe I want to create. On one hand, I don’t want to beat myself up too much about this. The main reason for this is that, today, I’m about three full sizes bigger than I was 5 years ago before I fell pregnant with my son and my new size and body shape has required a new wardrobe.

But it is a fact that it is useful for me to be conscious about going forward. This is also something I’m already trying to address in my sewing practice. Given my propensity to weight fluctuations, I am exploring pattern styles which are more flexible and finishing seams in ways that don’t make it prohibitive to unpick and take in or out in the future.

Wish list for optimising Stylebook for sewists

I am definitely enjoying using Stylebook and plan to continue to do so. I feel that over time, as I develop more statistics on wear, it will become more and more useful in enabling me to identify what I wear most.

Thereby hopefully forcing me to fully reflect on ‘why?’!

But I did want to highlight a few small areas were I think it could be more useful, particularly for sewists.

The most important function to date for me has been the calendar feature, where I record what I wear each day. It is by recording each outfit, that I am able to gather statistics over time.

A little thing to be aware of if you use the calendar function is that whilst you can always click into the calendar to see everything you wore on any given day, the overall view of the calendar only shows the first item you entered into the calendar that day. So, if you have entered an entire ‘look’ that you have created and saved, then you can see the whole outfit. But if you are entering garments separately that do not already exist as a ‘look’ only the first garment you enter will be visible. So, you know, maybe start with the most important item!

One thing that I wish the Stylebook app could do is break down wear statistics over specific time periods. Unless I’m missing something, the app can only give me statistics of most worn and least worn items from the time I started using the app until the present. It can also tell you the single most worn item in any given month. But that’s it.

What if I want to know what garments I wear most often during summer, or during winter, or while I was on a vacation? For example, having just been to Australia, my most worn items currently reflect a lot of summer items, but now that I’m back in winter, that data is not really providing any insight into what I like to wear most in my daily real life. So, I wish I could enter specific time periods and see better break downs which might enable me to draw better insights.

The other thing I wish was possible for sewists was to create your own custom metadata fields which could be filled in for each item.

Within the app, you can create your own custom categories for what’s in your wardrobe (e.g. I added the sub-category of ‘Shirt Dresses’ and the category of ‘Jumpsuits’ because I have about a million of those apparently).

But the data which is collected for each garment is pre-set and can’t be customised, with only the Notes section offering flexibility. I would love to have been able to have added a metadata category like ‘Pattern company’ which I would have then filled out for each me-made item, so that I could gather overall statistics for which indie pattern companies I sew with the most (my bet is Closet Case). Again, unless I’m missing something, I don’t think it is possible to do this.

I also realised, in the course of preparing this blog post, that I wish the app would generate more shareable statistical data. For example, pie charts that would demonstrate the content of more than one slice of the pie in a single image!

A final minor complaint is that, since I use the Stylebook app on my phone, I sometimes find the thumbnail images of the garments a bit small. I find myself squinting at the wardrobe page thinking ‘hmmm, which pair of my navy pants is it that I’m putting on today?’. Some of this could just be the quality of my input photos and this may be something that can actually be rectified. But I could understand that if you have any visual challenges, this could become a tad difficult.

The interface also sometimes seems to require a lot of clicking and uses a lot of categories and sub-categories. It’s also perhaps a bit clunky and not super-intuitive. For example, every category in your wardrobe MUST contain subcategories, which I found not necessary for some smaller categories in my own wardrobe (e.g. loungewear). But, I’ll be honest, I’m definitely nit-picking here because overall it’s perfectly easy enough to use.

But these are all pretty minor issues for something that I’m finding is providing me with significant insights and which, after the initial struggle of getting your wardrobe into Stylebook, requires next to no time to maintain.

So what do you think? Does this kind of record-keeping sound intriguing or insane to you? Anyone else out there on the wardrobe statistic bandwagon? What tools do you use to do it? Please share in the comments!!!!!

Oh and, finally, a little P.S! If you like to get your blog hits through Bloglovin’, feel free to follow me over there: you can find me here. And you can find me on Instagram here.