Invite a group of your friends to come to your house and bring all of their clothes, shoes, and accessories that they don’t want anymore (and that they would be getting rid of anyway).  Sort and organize all of the items and then tell everyone to choose items to take home….for FREE.  It’s a win-win for everyone involved because they get to clean out their closets, and also refresh it with new pieces.

Here are a few tips if you want to host your own:

Send out an invitation a couple weeks in advance.  This could be an email, Facebook event, Evite, ect…  Keep in mind the amount of space that you have, and how many women you can accomodate (we invited about 20 women).

Ask the invitees to give their items to you before the swap (depending on how many people, you may need up to a week to sort everything).  That way, you can make everything super-duper organized and cute before your friends arrive!

Stormie let us use her house for the swap.  We helped her get some of the bags sorted and folded and she did a great job of setting up, and organizing the rest.

You will need tables to put everything on.  You really can’t have too much space for this.  We organized items by category, and then size.

Make the items look attractive.  This is the fun part- instead of just throwing everything in a pile, lay out and arrange them in a cute way.  It’s fun to pair up bright colors and find unique ways to hang jewelry or hats.

In Stormie’s spare bedroom we set up 3 tables for shirts, pants and skirts.  Shirts seem to be the highest quantity item when we do these, so they needed the most space.  It was a lot of work to sort and fold all of these, but as you can see, it is much easier to go through and find what you want!

Oh!  I almost forgot the most important part – food!  We had our swap in the morning, and asked each of our friends to bring a small breakfast item to share.  The food was delish, and gave us energy to do all of that hard shopping;)

After eating and drinking lots of coffee – it’s time to shop…

It was so fun to watch everyone go through the clothes and take lots of new stuff home.  Nobody walked away empty-handed, and it was a fun morning to get together to chat, eat, and swap!

A few more thoughts on hosting a swap:

Everyone that wants to take part in the swap MUST donate items.  It’s the same principle of “Take a penny, leave a penny”

We chose to do ours in the morning so that it wouldn’t cut into other activities.  You could very easily do this in the afternoon or evening – whatever works best for your group.

Ask for help!  Don’t try to take on the duty of sorting and organizing all by yourself.  Ask a few friends to come over and help a few days before and it will save you a lot of time.

Don’t “pre-select” any clothing while sorting.  This may be hard, but don’t allow yourself or your helpers to pick items out before the swap.  Part of the fun is getting to experience the swap as a group, and if you’ve already taken everything you want, you’ll just be standing around with nothing to do while everyone else is having fun.

Give shopping bags out  to carry loot home.

Have a designated “Dressing Room” available for trying on the clothes they aren’t sure of.

Donate the leftovers.  You will definitely have items left at the end of the swap – bag them up and take them to the thrift store.  It’s a great way to give back.

Thanks to all of our friend for coming to the swap!  We hope that this will inspire you to have one!

I saw this photo of Meredith Khan on TheGlow yesterday and instantly fell in love with her style – particularly, this shredded jersey shirt from designer Raquel Allegra.  From there, it’s all been a downhill slide into shredded jersey land.

This shirt is available to purchase from The House of Four.

Commeonveut on Etsy has great shredded pieces.  I especially love this cardigan.

This entire look wants to come home with me – I’m sure of it. {Source}

Yes. {Source}

There are tons of tutorials online of how to shred jersey – I will definitely be trying it, possibly even this weekend.  You know…because I will probably be snowed in…

Yep – that’s my car this morning.  Stuck after I slid off the road.  I had to call a couple of my co-workers (the best people EVER) to come help me push it out.  There was also a very kind man in a truck who stopped – he was a gem.

Have a safe weekend!

January is officially over (did you know?), and I finally completed my January Photo-A-Day Challenge that I told you about.  I just finished today because of being sick, but better late than….well, you know.  Here’s the second half – enjoy!

Day16:  Morning

Day 17:  Water

Day 18:  Something you bought

Day 19:  Sweet

Day 20:  Someone you love

Day 21:  Reflection

Day 22:  Your shoes  (you can see another post on these photos here)

Day 23:  Something old

Day 24:  Guilty Pleasure

Day 25:  Something you made

Day 26:  Color

Day 27:  Lunch

Day 28:  Light

Day 29:  In your fridge

Day 30:  Nature

Day 31:  You.  Again.

Hope you liked seeing my Instagrams from this month.  If you have an iPhone, you can follow me (user name:  stephanie_may ) and see them much much quicker – I really like it, and tend to post…a lot:)

In any case, I did find a supremely lovely looking lady – not only are her tights just plain cute, but I’m semi in love with her tattoos.  I probably wouldn’t have done stars, but they are interesting.

{Source}

I posted this photo last year around Valentine’s Day – and I still love it.

{Source}

I do have some plans in the works for Valentine’s Day this year involving the nieces and nephews – but I won’t share any specifics until after the fact – hopefully I’ll get some good photos of our hang-out time.  Help a sista out though…what are your plans for Valentine’s and what are you wearing?

I’ll save us all and take my crabby mood elsewhere for now.

I’m sick.  It’s no fun….not one little bit.  I haven’t been sick like this in quite awhile, and I really want to continue on with normal life, but I can’t.  My body won’t let me.  Bleh*  The one good thing about being sick is getting to lay in bed and watch massive amounts of tv.  For instance, today I have watched:

Friday Night Lights (new to me – Stormie begged me to start watching it)

Gilmore Girls (always watching this)

Pretty Little Liars (okay, it’s a guilty pleasure…)

Project Runway All Stars (Go Mondo!)

Impressive amount of tv huh?  Anyway, I’m hoping that by Thursday I will be energized and full of life.  We shall see;)  Oh, and Stormie will be here tomorrow with a dazzling blog post for you, so now you have a reason to get up in the morning.

I went to Taiwan with my sister and brother-in-law to lead worship for a conference.  We were able to spend a little over a week there before heading over to Japan and I have decided that I MUST get back someday…hopefully sooner than later.  My sister and I have even tried convincing our family to go there for a family vacation (I’m still pulling for that).  Since it has been on my mind so much, I thought I would share a few of my favorite photos – enjoy!

The area that we were in – Ximending, Taipei – is a center for a very large population of young people.  It is amazing.

Scooters.

Every 7-Eleven should have food like this.  I don’t know that I would try it, but they should.

The Starbucks was less than a block from our hotel – lucky me.

View from Taipei 101 – now the second tallest building in the world after the Burj Khalifa was built in Dubai.

Hey, there’s me.

Throwing down some tunes outside for a group of people in Ximending.

By far my absolute favorite photo of my nephew.

Have a gorgeous weekend!

Love this pair with little lace triangle cut-outs!

Pattern, color, flats, beret, blazer.  I pretty much love everything about this look.

Lace!  One of my favorite looks – I even love the seams on the inside and outside of the legs.

These leggings are fascinating, and I love the cloud dress.

The detail in the front of these black leggings is uber-cool.  And those Captain Hook boots are pretty sweet.

Oooooh, red velvet leggings?!

The openings in these leggings break up the black and add such great texture to this whole look.  *want*

I want all of these.

I did a bit of looking around and found a few sources for cute leggings:

TopShop

ModCloth

Forever 21

Do you have a good source for cute leggings?  Do tell!

These will be listed this week and there is more to come, but here is a little preview:

And in other fun news, we have a new sale section in our shop – $20 shoes!!!

Happy browsing!

Stormie gave me this CUTE pair of vintage shoes this weekend (thanks Storm!), and they were perfect for one of my January Instagrams, so I wanted to snap a few photos of myself in them.

I started clicking, and then I got a visitor…

Me:  Hmmmm.  Still there.  Maybe if I turn and take the photos over here….

Shoot, didn’t work.

Uhhhh, hi.

Oh look, she found a toy…

…and now she’s untying my wrap skirt.

Gotta go.

P.S.  Should’ve named her Shadow.

Currently, I am hanging out on my couch watching Harry Potter (the first one) for the – gasp – very first time.  A few days ago I finished reading the first book and am now halfway through the second book.  I always said I would eventually read the books and see the movies, they just weren’t at the top of my list.  Since I recently made my co-workers read The Hunger Games series, I told them all I would start on Harry Potter next.

I am enjoying it so far and the plan is to read a book, watch the movies, etc.  So far it’s going well.

Do you like Harry Potter?  If so, don’t ruin anything for me – I know absolutely nothing about it beyond what I’ve read so far:-)