A few weeks ago I hosted a Swap Party, and it was so great! A Swap Party is where people come together and bring things they don’t want/need anymore, and trade with each other. You go home with some new stuff for free! Here is how I hosted it:

• Decide what you want to have as a theme. We swapped: clothes, shoes, accessories, books, movies, and housewares. You could be more specific and do toys or anything really.
• Pick a date
• Send an e-vite
• Set up lots of space to spread out things. I made my dining room a clothing area for clothes with number sizes, and hung various pieces of paper around the room so that people could lay out their items. I made the kitchen an area for clothes that were marked small, medium, large. The fireplace hosted shoes, and the bar hosted purses and accessories. The couch held books and movies, and a folding table hosted housewares.
• Set aside a place for things that ARE NOT up for swapping! (purses, shoes, jackets etc) I used a guest room and closed the door.
• Have some mirrors for trying things on.
• Have some folks bring snacks and drinks or set them up yourself. We ate some before we started and after we finished.
• Have everyone arrive at a set time, and start the swapping at a set time about 30 minutes later. This allows everyone time to set out their stuff and for late arrivals.
• You can decide how to do the actual swapping. I looked up several websites, many of which advocated a ticket system. Bring 10 items, get 10 tickets for 10 things to take home. Some even said you could draw names to decide the order of who got to pick first. This might be important if you think people are going to be competitive for things, or if you don’t know the people coming. But we are all friends and pretty polite at that, so I didn’t figure there would be much battle over stuff, so we didn’t do this.
• Everyone needs a bag to put their stuff in as they go, so you can tell when something is taken.

So when the actual swap started, here is what we did… We took one category at a time.

First the purses. We all stood around the purse selection and everyone took one.  Then when all were satisfied, everyone who saw one they wanted took a second. And so on until we were all done. I ended up with that lovely giraffe print one that I had been eying at stores for MONTHS unable to fork over the cash for one, and a zebra one too! Thanks Kasey!

Then we moved on to clothes. We just basically started wandering around, holding up stuff, and trying it on. I had a “fitting room” set up in my bedroom, but we just all ended up trying stuff on right there in the living room where the clothes were, it was easier that way. We would try stuff and others would offer their opinion. If something didn’t fit, we would put it back in the pile, or maybe give it to someone else that we thought it might fit.

After clothes, we moved on to jewelry/accessories, shoes, then books/movies, then housewares. (As you can see we didn’t have a lot of home decor, but I think everyone mostly had focused on clothes to bring.) Then everyone made a last wander around to see if there was anything else they wanted.At the end, we had another snack and watched some TV. Then we went around and showed all that we got and you had to claim it if you brought it, so we could see whose stuff we got. That was really fun because it was nice to see someone else using the stuff that you didn’t use anymore.

Now that I think about it, I think it just goes to show how sweet all these friends of mine are…there was so much encouraging going on! People would be unsure if what they tried on looked good, and lots of encouragement was given! People would ask what you should wear with a certain item, and fashion suggestions were given! People even ended up with whole outfits! I think it helped that we all have pretty similar tastes. I think we all like each other’s styles pretty well so it was easy to give each other suggestions about what went together or how something looked. I think we all like the same stores too, as there was a lot of stuff from GAP, Banana Republic, Ann Taylor, Old Navy, etc there.  It was really super fun! Sometimes you would have to persuade someone to take something, as they worried that someone else wanted it to. I think everyone ended up pretty satisfied with their haul. We all got at least one big shopping bag full if not more. And a good variety too. I got several pairs of jeans, some shirts, a couple of books, and a couple of purses. Look at my bag of stuff!

Needless to say, it was REALLY fun and we look forward to doing another one of these in a few months. Click here and here to read other accounts about our party. Here and here are some good links that gave me some ideas.  So if you didn’t get to come this time, maybe you can next time! And if you don’t live around here…well, host your own!