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.
I really like this idea. Unfortunately, I don’t know that many women, either where my family lives or in the city I moved to six months ago. My mother and sister are very close in sizes to me, all about 14/16 in pants, from L to 2X on top. We’ve been raiding each other’s closets for a long time though… I mentioned this idea to them while visiting recently, and while it interested them, they could think of very few friends that weren’t more petite than we are. Do you have any advice on how to expand our groups, find more women in similar sizes, etc., so that we could have an awesome clothing swap party.
Some ideas that you might want to try are:
- You and your family can pass the idea on to your friends, co-workers and people you meet. Perhaps they have other friends who are in a variety of sizes as well that they could invite to such a party.
- Join Freecycle, Recycle and Reuse groups in your area. Search in Yahoo Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com) for them. It’s a great way to network with others who embrace these sorts of ideas. You can start your search at http://www.freecycle.org.
- Join social groups in your new area .. this will serve not only to potentially introduce you to people who might be interested in this idea, but also will help you acclimate socially to your new area.