swap shop

After a very pleasant birthday on Tuesday, I signed on the dole. Yay me - I'm that fucking poor.
I hate it. It's humiliating and depressing and so in typical Earth Girl style I have been trying to eat my way back to happiness. Naturally this hasn't worked and I now feel even worse than I did to begin with.

I had a encouraging meeting with a bloke from an employment agency on Thursday and he gave me 3 promising job adverts to look at. So I'm not a completely lost cause.

Anyway, back to the main reason for today's post. Have you heard about the Visa Swap Shop? It was open for a month as a sort of experiment in recycling clothes. Instead of just dropping off your old stuff at the local charity shop you were encouraged to take your old clothes down to the swap shop and hand them over in exchange for points. The better quality the clothes (ie: the more exclusive the label) the more points you got. Of course most of my clothes(well all actually) are low end High Street - a heady mix of Primark, New Look and H&M, so I wasn't expecting a lot of points but thanks to a bag full of FCUK clothes Nemesis was getting rid of I scraped together 650 points.

The week after they stopped taking in clothes they opened up the shop to give them all away, so at 9.30 am I arrived in Kinghtsbridge to find myself at the back of a very long que of women desperate to get their hands on some designer goodies. The ones at the front had been there since 4am.

A woman from the shop came down the que informing every one that it was a limit of 2 hand bag purchases each - to make things fair. By the time I got in there were only a hand full of cheap & crappy handbags from Top Shop and Primark left. I was gutted.
I was after a handbag as I was under no delusions that I would find a single piece of clothing to fit me. The average clothing article was size 8 - with a fair few sixes thrown in for good measure. The only items on the rails over a size 14 were items I had brought in the previous week.

So not wanting to waste my time and effort I grabbed some of the many donations that had never been worn and still had the labels on them figuring I could sell them on eBay. My haul included a pair of leather knee high boots from Ravel - still in the box, 2 juicy couture tops, a PINK shirt and a really, really nice suede jacket which I would keep - if only I could fit into it.

I'll let you know how the eBay auctions go.