swap till you drop

A few weeks ago I hosted (and attended) my very first clothing swap party. I needed to trim down my closet in preparation for our move to Uganda, so the idea of a clothing swap sounded genius. Our apartment is a little on the small side (and a little on the haphazardly-being-dismantled side) so my friend Lindsay agreed to have it at her place. Her poor husband was informed that he would have to vacate the premises for the evening of April 6 and we set about planning.

Some notes on how I hosted a clothing swap party:

1. I sent out the invitations as far in advance as I could (about a month) to give people plenty of notice to look through their closets. I just sent a Facebook invitation, so as the party drew closer I could remind people about it. I read that 10 -15 is a good number for a swap. We ended up having only eight girls (plus one who couldn't

come but sent clothing), and it still worked wonderfully. In the invitation I explained the idea, told the guests what to expect and gave guidelines about what to bring.

2. My guidelines: everyone had to bring a minimum of five items. These could be pieces of clothing, jewelry or accessories. Stains and broken zippers were to be left at home, along with any used bathing suits or undergarments :) Bringing some items with flexible sizing was encouraged.

3. We decided to make the party especially feminine, so I made a pretty strawberry angel food cake trifle (mostly just so I could use the trifle dish I got as a wedding gift) and brought out my teacups.

4. Since we had just purchased plenty of bins for our move, I used them to organize the clothes. I made labels using scrapbooking paper and organized the bins according to short-sleeve and sleeveless tops, long-sleeve tops, bottoms and accessories. I used a clothes drying rack and the curtain road to drape jackets and hang dresses. We got a lot of short-sleeve and sleeveless tops, so we ended up separating them into two different bins.

Our own little Frenchy's! 

5. My friend Cait sells handmade jewelry. It was fun to have her jewelry stand there to make it feel more like an event and to have the option of adding jewelry to new outfits.

Embellish jewelry by Cait

6. Tickets. Even though there were only eight of us, and even though we are all *nice* girls, we all know that things can get tricky when it comes to deciding who gets what. So I bought tickets from the dollar store. After everyone had arrived and the clothes had been organized, there was a set amount of time to browse through everything and try things on, and then everyone got five tickets. They got to pick their "top five" pieces (to avoid one person snagging all the good stuff). If there was a dispute over a certain item, they could "spend" more than one ticket on it to outbid the other person. The tickets helped keep things organized and it was fun to go around in a circle and show off your favourite pieces. Surprisingly we all had different styles and wardrobe needs, so there were only one or two items that more than one girl had her eye on.

7. After picking our favourites and spending our tickets, it was a free for all! Some people could stock up their wardrobes, while others wanted to downsize their closets and only pick up a few new things. It was really fun to try stuff  on together and get each other's opinions on different pieces. Surprisingly, despite the variance in sizes everything worked out.

At the end of the night ... we had a lot of fun and every girl walked away with new (free!) clothes. The only failure: I didn't end up scaling down my wardrobe as much as I had hoped :) I can never pass up new clothes!