Archive for the 'Conscious Simplification' Category

Clothing swap parties

Published on January 31, 2008 in Conscious Simplification and Tips. 2 Comments

Instead of just donating your used clothing to charities to resell to people you don’t know.. why not find creative ways to dispose of your unneeded wardrobe pieces? One such idea is a clothing swap party.

Here’s the idea. You invite all your friends over, and ask them to bring a bag of clothing from home of things they’re no longer wearing and would have donated anyway. Everyone gets together, perhaps even sharing a pot-luck meal, tasty beverages or whatever. Everyone then spreads out their clothing and everyone goes through it to find pieces they might like and goes to try them on. For a fun twist with the right group, you can turn it into a ‘Naked Lady Party’ – in which everyone takes off their clothing and tries on pieces right there.

It’s a great opportunity to have a fun social party, embrace the philosophy of re-using and gives your entire social network awarenes around purging.
You can even have pieces of clothing for the whole family that get swapped around.

In the end, any pieces that didn’t find new homes, the host can collect and make a large donation. Usually, the guests allow the host to take the donation receipt to use as their tax write off in thanks for hosting the party.

The value and fun of thrift shopping

Published on January 26, 2008 in Conscious Simplification and Tips. 0 Comments

Clothing is fun to buy and wear, and I love variety in my wardrobe. When I had access to a large closet and dresser, I’d almost always have them at full capacity. No matter the space I have, it always seems to fill. In order to make room for new purchases, I have to get rid of the old.  This is usually accomplished by once or twice a year doing a round of purging.

I go through my closet and drawers, take everything out and toss it on my bed.  I then put it all away, but evaluating each item for the following:

  • Have I worn it in the last year?
  • Does it serve a useful function in my wardrobe?
  • Does it still fit?
  • Is it something I will actually wear in the next few months?
  • Is there anything annoying about it? Such as unusual fit, scratchy materials, I don’t have the proper bra to wear under it, etc.?

I then toss stuff that doesn’t meet my ‘keep’ criteria into a pile to donate somewhere locally.  Some items, if they have value (such as formal wear, vintage clothing, high dollar specialty items, hardly worn stuff) I might put up on eBay – but generally, clothing doesn’t hold enough value to do so.

It’s a great process, and seeing the results of a trimmed down closet and drawers that easily shut is quite rewarding.

And now I have justification to go buy new things.

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However, last year I moved into a 50 square foot travel trailer for seven months as I traveled around the country.  My closets and drawers were reduced down to about 1/15th the space I was used to. I did a massive purge with a lot of pre-thought about what I’d actually need to take with me.  Unfortunately, the space I had didn’t leave room for a lot of variety in my wardrobe.  I had only enough space to keep enough basics to meet the different climates I would be in.  After a month or so,  I knew I’d be bored wearing the same things over and over.

So, what I discovered as a solution to this was just to plan of refreshing my wardrobe on a regular basis.  But this would far too costly to do on a regular basis by shopping in regular stores.  I had already been introduced to thrift store shopping, and really enjoyed the process. But up until this point, thrifting was a fun hobby that helped supplement my wardrobe with cool things that I wouldn’t ordinarily buy at department store prices.  So, I decided to try making thrifting my primary way of replenishing my wardrobe as I traveled.

I would plan to purge about 1/5th my wardrobe when I started to feel bored (or the climates changed) and then only restock my wardrobe with thrift store finds. It became a lot of fun to find the thrift stores in the various cities I was in, and having a constantly refreshed wardrobe for only $20-30 a trip.  It worked really well for me, and I felt good about embracing the re-use philosophy.

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Now that I’m back in a regular house (with plans to hit the road again the future), I’m keeping the same model.  I keep my wardrobe small, so that I can hit the road at anytime with minimal preparations – and I enjoy the pursuit of thrift shopping to inexpensively refresh my wardrobe.  But I always donate something when I get something new.. keeping my wardrobe size the same.

Stay tuned for more tips on fun ways to keep your wardrobe refreshed..

Thoughts on ‘Stuff’

Published on December 31, 2007 in Conscious Simplification. 0 Comments

Stuff. Look around you, it’s everywhere. Whether you purchase it at your local mall, Amazon.com, eBay, a thrift store, WalMart, received it as a gift, got as swag from a conventions or even if you’re crafty enough to make it yourself out of stuff you got elsewhere – no matter how much space you have, you can pretty much count on stuff filling your space.

Several years ago, I make a conscious attempt to break my mindless consumer acquiring cycle after reading an inspiring book The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture by a friend of a friend, Dell Dechant, which explores the religious and ritual aspects of consumerism (yes, I realize I gave you a link to Amazon.com to make it easy for you to make a consumer purchase). I tried to give active thought to things I purchase and bring into my home. Asking myself questions like .. do I really need it? Will I make use of it? Will it bring me joy beyond the cash register? Will I be able to dispose of this item in an environmentally sensitive way? Etc.

As is typical in life, I would have my good moments and my weak moments. And when you’re living in a large house with lots of space, it takes a while to realize the impact of those weak moments. And a good round of purging every year or so goes a long ways to keeping the amount of ‘stuff’ manageable.

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This past spring, as many are well aware of, I did likely the most major purge of stuff I will ever (or at least I hope) in my life. I trimmed the contents of my 1600 sq ft home (that I shared with a housemate) down to fit into a 50 sq ft travel trailer (that I shared with my partner) plus a couple of boxes stuck in storage. I sold a good bit on eBay and Amazon marketplace, and I donated several carloads to Goodwill. And I can honestly say, I don’t miss any of my ‘stuff’.

The relief I felt from shedding so much stuff, made me realize just how much baggage stuff is. We choose our living environment in part based on how our stuff will fit into it, and we upgrade to have more space to hold our stuff. We pay for our stuff constantly by renting moving vans and efforts we take each time we move locations. We box it up, put it away in closets for ‘some day’. And when our closets are full.. we pay to store our extra ‘stuff’ in places where we don’t interact with our stuff at all. We keep spending more money to keep our stuff, leaving less money to go do things that acquire memories that don’t take up space.

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Now of course, some stuff is worth keeping. I’m not saying.. stuff is bad. But I am saying, it’s easy to get wrapped up in acquiring stuff and not benefiting from the reasons of why we got it in the first place.

When I moved into a 16′ trailer to be shared by two for our amazing seven month cross country road trip, I had to consciously consider every single thing I moved into it. Every piece of clothing – will it be versatile enough to merit the space? Every bra, every pair of socks, every toiletry, every kitchen utensil and every piece of jewelery. I kept only a selection of my poi supplies (my art, I guess you could call it), and I trimmed down my office into a backpack and a small portable file case.

Now of course, most people will never need to go to such extremes as I did, but it was a valuable lesson and perspective adjustment to see just how little stuff I actually needed to be comfortable and happy.

Amazingly, after Chris and I both moved into such a small space – we actually have little pockets of open space. As we go along our journey, there is temptation to acquire new things. Whether it be attending conventions and getting new cool bags and pens and such. Or friends gifting us with cool things. Or doing shopping of our own. Even consumables, like food, we have to be conscious of the space it takes up. Even with as little stuff as we have as compared to the typical American household.. we find ourselves being bogged down by ‘stuff’ and repeating the purge cycle.

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Over the summer, we attended SolFest in Hopland, CA – an festival for solar power and other green living choices. Chris and I partook of the organic wine tasting, which required BUYING one of their wine glasses. Granted, it’s a nice, durable, wine glass with the SolFest logo. And for $10, you got the glass plus 5 tastings. We argued with the volunteer that we didn’t want glasses – we didn’t have the space for them, and we didn’t have the need for them (glass.. trailer.. bumpy roads.. bad). It wasn’t about the cost of buying a glass, it was about being conscious of acquiring things.

So instead of buying two glasses, we just shared one. Which turned out to be a great lead-in when tasting, as when the vendors asked ‘Just one glass?’, we would explain why. It drove home the point of just how integrated in acquiring stuff is in our culture . Even at a ‘green’ festival. We also got several of the vendors intrigued by our journey. We actually ended up ‘tasting’ far more wine than two tasting packages would have afforded us by vendors pouring liberally for us as we told our tales – all catalyzed by being conscious of how much stuff we acquired and holding only one glass.

Less stuff can equal more quality.

Oh, and the fate of the glass? We gifted it to a friend along the way who was serving us wine and didn’t have enough wine glasses and was going to buy more so she had enough for future guests.