Hiatus

After almost four years, I've decided to take a hiatus from this blog. There is a lot going on in my life right now, and although I loved this blog, I don't have the time I need to focus on it. I'd like to thank everyone for reading; I've met some wonderful people through this blog. Thank you all!

OOTD: Ann Taylor Loft

I have a friend who sells a lot of Ann Taylor Loft on eBay. She's kind of a genius at it. She manages to find these awesome, career-appropriate pieces and market them incredibly successfully in her eBay store. She's a great example of working with what you can find when it comes to reselling. I've learned a lot from her, and she's absolutely meticulous about the items she sells. One of the neatest things about thrifting is meeting like-minded bargain hunters. I know my life is richer for having met her!

Anyway, my friend was the inspiration behind my outfit at work last Friday. I had a business lunch to celebrate the end of a big project, and we went to this nifty little outdoor French cafe at the Farmers Market at the Grove. It was a relatively warm day, so this outfit worked perfectly.

I'm wearing an Ann Taylor Loft dress that I found at Goodwill for $7.99, along with a chunky silver necklace purchased at the Ann Taylor Loft store on final clearance for $7.88. Atop the dress is a cardigan from Nordstrom's BP juniors line, purchased for $9 on clearance. My friend Gina gifted me the boots that I'm wearing, which are called the "Tawny Riding Boot" and are by Crown Vintage (sold at DSW). All told, I have less than $25 in the whole outfit. Take that, retail prices!

Thrift store score: Ex Machina trades

My husband Shawn is a huge comic book fan. Ever since I've known him, he makes an almost-weekly trip to a local comic shop to pick up the latest issues of the series that he follows. Among his favorites & current reading list are anything by Grant Morrison, Walking Dead, Cobra, Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles, Preacher, Hellblazer, Stray Bullets, Swamp Thing, Rachel Rising, The Boys, Severed and The Strange Talent of Luther Strode. I usually go along with him, but I confess that after about 20 or 30 minutes, I tend to wander over to Trader Joe's. (I do think it's important to go, though, because fair is fair: He goes with me to the mall and is good for about 30 minutes before heading off to Starbucks.)

Yesterday, we were out running errands and I decided to pop into a local Goodwill. While I was looking for goodies in the clothing racks, he went back to the book section. About 15 minutes later, he lopes over to me with a big grin on his face. He's carrying eight "trades" (soft-cover books that collect several single issues into one collection) of the Brian K. Vaughan series "Ex Machina." (Go here to read more about it.) This is a series that he's been meaning to read for awhile, but hasn't because there always are other things before that on his list. (Just like I have an Anthropologie wishlist, he has a comic wishlist, and just like I sale-stalk, he has his own order of acquisition.)

Anyway. These trades are fairly spendy at the regular stores; even on Amazon, they still want between $10 and $30 for each volume. The ones at Goodwill, however, were only $1.99 each, plus they were in very good condition. Needless to say, he was quite pleased with the score and has been reading them all weekend.

And who said thrifting was just about clothes?!

Serial Thrifter Girls: A new series

I’ve been absent on this blog for awhile, but it’s because I’ve been knee-deep in a project that I’ve been hoping to launch for several months now. It’s called “Serial Thrifter Girls,” and I would love to tell you about it.

Some of my friends joke that I am a “clothes whisperer.” They claim I have special powers when it comes to shopping and scoring deals. I’ve had some awesome successes through the years, including finding my husband a vintage Schott Perfecto jacket for $19.99 at the Goodwill, or finding one of my best friends a vintage-inspired wedding dress on eBay after the one she bought on Etsy fell apart just a few days before her big day. When Shawn got a new job that required him to wear dressier clothes, I went to the thrift, because I knew I could score some designer shirts at a fraction of the price I’d pay new, on sale, on eBay or clearance. My dad loves Tommy Bahama silk shirts, and instead of paying $110 apiece new, which neither of us could justify, I turned to the thrift. He now has more than a dozen of them – and if you added up what I spent in total, it would still be less than half the price of ONE new shirt.

For the past year or so, I’ve been trying to figure out a series I could do on the blog that would showcase how I use thrift stores, eBay, Etsy, online sales and discount stores to put together a wardrobe without breaking the bank. Inspiration came to me in the form of my two best friends, Melissa and Vanessa. Melissa is getting married this year, and she just bought a house, so her discretionary income is being used for more important things like water heaters and paint. Vanessa just had a baby last January, so she and her husband are spending money on things that beep, scoot and flash. Although both of them love fashion and have incredible senses of style, spending a lot of money on clothes just isn’t a priority.

I wanted to ask Vanessa and Melissa to participate in this series for another reason as well. Both are beautiful plus-size women, and one of the most frequent complaints I hear is that thrift stores don’t provide much in the way of plus-size fashion. At first, I dismissed the complaint. But then as I was shopping for them in the thrifts, I began to realize that it’s not so much a problem of quantity as it is quality. I’ll delve into this more as the series goes on, but suffice to say, I have some strong opinions when it comes to the materials and patterns used in plus-size clothing.

Before I started shopping, I had Melissa and Vanessa fill out a small survey that asked about their interests, inspirations (fashion and non-fashion) and favorites (books, music, etc.). I wanted to find out what recent eras of fashion they liked, what they were wearing when they felt most confident, and what their concerns were when it came to clothing. I also asked them about colors and accessories, and whether they preferred heels, flats or boots. I wanted to get a sense of them not only in terms of what their fashion preferences were, but what informs their broader sense of style. To me, clothes can help tell a story. I first realized this when I was a music critic covering the local scene in Dayton, Ohio. Almost all of the musicians I met had a flare for the theatrical, whether they were heavy metal guitarists, jazz drummers or country banjo players. Their clothes said something about them, but they were also part of a larger story. I wanted to find out where Melissa and Vanessa saw themselves in the grander cultural zeitgeist.

Once I read their answers, I spent some time thinking about the types of items I wanted to find. I sketched out outfit ideas, focusing on what they liked and also what I knew they would look good in. For instance, both Vanessa and Melissa told me that they like color – but each of them likes it for a different reason. Whereas Vanessa wanted to experiment with color because she’s naturally drawn to it in photography, design and jewelry, color for Melissa is about making a political statement as a plus-size woman.

Putting together these capsule wardrobes for my two best friends became a quest that challenged me in many ways. I quickly realized that there are a lot of designers who are downright mean to their plus-size shoppers. Somewhere along the line, that horrible, clingy polyester-based fabric became the norm in plus-size fashion, as did leopard print, overblown floral patterns, enormous plastic beads and/or chiffon appliques. There are, unfortunately, very few designers who truly seem to “get” plus-size fashion, and those who do price their items very, very expensively. There’s little middle ground when it comes to plus-size fashion. It’s either affordable and ugly, or beautiful and expensive. And that makes it even harder if you’re pressed for time, have a budget or don’t like to/are self-conscious when it comes to shopping.

I’m still organizing how to present this series, and I know it will be spread out over a few months, but I hope that it will give you a tip or two for thrift (retail and resale) shopping!

10 Confessions of a Serial Thrifter

My pal Vanessa over at Little Gray Pixel linked up to her friend Deanna to join in on a "confessional" series that highlights things you might not know about her. It sounded like some fun, so I decided to do it today. I realize it's been a very long time since I blogged, so I'm also including a snap of my Halloween costume (I went as Jacqueline Kennedy).

So, without further ado, here goes!

(1) I am absolutely terrified of toasters. I always fear that they will spontaneously catch on fire and burn down my house. For years, I wouldn't allow Shawn to have one in the house. I finally caved and let him have a toaster oven, but it has to be immediately cleaned and unplugged after every use, and stored out of sight. I also unplug people's toasters when I go to their houses.

(2) After years of not having a favorite color, I finally realized that the color I truly love is not green (which I had thought was my favorite color), but orange. I can't get enough of it.

(3) I don't have many memories of my early childhood.

(4) I took dance lessons from the time I was 8 until the time I was 20. My favorite was tap dancing. I have a VHS tape of my routine to "Tequila." I believe my mother still has my original costume.

(5) Every single day, I miss my girlfriends in Ohio and Illinois because they are such beautiful, wonderful, smart, sassy, educated, erudite, candid, dauntless women.

(6) No matter how bad a day is, looking at a penguin always makes me smile.

(7) My car has over 126,000 miles on it and will be 10 years old this year. I don't think I will ever sell it; it's a 2002 Pontiac Firebird.

(8) Shawn and I celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary this month and decided that for our 10th, we're going to take a month-long trip to visit New Zealand, Dubai and London. The London leg will be a repeat of where we spent our honeymoon.

(9) Reading is my favorite pastime. I'm constantly reading something. I just finished reading the first two books in the young adult Mortal Instruments series, and up next is "Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum" by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino.

(10) When it comes to salty vs. sweet, I definitely come down on the side of salty.

It's time for a closet purge

One of the occupational hazards of being a serial thrifter is that it's easy to compile a huge wardrobe very quickly. It's also easy to experiment with different looks and styles when the investment is minimal. But that means -- at least for me -- that I run out of space very quickly. My husband and I live in 1940s-era military base housing that was converted into townhomes, so our closets are very tiny. Add to the mix the fact that I also need space for eBay and Anthropologie Treasurebox inventory, and it becomes even more of a challenge. Right now, the solution has been to use storage bins and clothing rolling racks, but I'd like to reclaim some space in our guest bedroom/office.

My style also seems to be settling into a few specific looks and preferences, which means I'm definitely ready to part with some of the pieces that I've acquired. This weekend, I plan to seriously purge my closets. I do mini-purges here and there, but I've never tackled anything quite so extensive as this. I'm going to force myself to be honest: If it doesn't fit correctly, it goes. If it hasn't been worn at least once in the past six months, it's gone. If I'm keeping it just because it's pretty, it goes.

I have high hopes for this purge. I plan to follow the three simple steps to a successful purge laid out by Sally of Already Pretty, which is one of my favorite blogs. Channeling her great advice, I hope to wind up with a manageable wardrobe that truly reflects my style and life.

p.s. I'm also just going to admit that with the exception of one cardigan, Nanette Lepore and I are just NOT A GOOD MATCH. Sigh. Oh, how it pains me.

Thrift store score: J Crew Vintage Cotton Sequin Henley

For the past few months, I've been wearing a lot of simple outfits -- mostly boatneck 3/4-sleeve tops from J Crew with snaps on the sleeves or at the shoulders. They're incredibly effortless, and I pair them with jeans and flats -- it's the perfect weekend outfit. The problem is -- I hate paying J. Crew's prices for their 3/4-sleeve tops. Anything over $20 and I get the hives. So imagine my delight when I spotted the Vintage Cotton Sequin Henley -- originally $49.50 -- at a thrift store this past week for $5.49! Score! Now that's more like it, especially for a top that is so delicate it will probably either get one of those mysterious little holes in it the first time I wash it or am stuck in the belly with the claw of an 18-pound cat.