thriftflips20project

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Thrift Flips Week 12

This week Jules and I have decided to start working on our final product. Our final product is a slideshow showing our process of thrifting and flipping. Not only will the slideshow show our process, but it will also be a beginners guide to thrifting and flipping since it is an easy and fun side hustle. We plan to add one slide to it per week but that might change in the next couple weeks depending on what we're doing and when we need to be finished. This project has snuck up on us a little bit because today in class Mr. Hinton said we only have three more Mondays to work on our 20% project which scares me a little. This week, I also shipped off another order from Depop. I don’t think Jules and I need to thrift anymore clothes for now because we have enough. We just need to sell all of the clothes that we’ve thrifted and flipped so far. One goal of mine for this week and this month of March is to use my class time more efficiently. I end up getting distracted and talking to my friends but I should fully devote this time to the project because I can do a lot of work within 45 minutes if I am actually focussed. Finally, I am excited to start working on the final slideshow because that is what we are going to present and it encapsulates all the hard work Jules and I have put into this project over the past couple of months.

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Thrift Flips Week 11

This week Jules and I made our first Depop sale! I think this aligns with our plan that we made in the beginning of our project saying we want to be selling items by February. This is a great achievement for us because it shows that we are good at thrifting and flipping clothes because people actually want to buy them. The item that the person bought was a shirt that Jules and I found at Savers for four dollars. It was just a plain red lacy tank top but it was kind of loose. Since the top was cute, we saw the potential and bought it. We then took Jules' sewing machine and cinched the sides in making it a better fit. We did this by pinning the area that we wanted to take off in. Then using the sewing machine to cut that part off and then sewing the back to the front once again. We had to do this on both the right and left side of the tank top. Since we left the top at Jules' house, she is going to get an old cardboard box, print out the shipping label and ship the item off to the person who purchased it. One thing that surprised me was that the item sold so quickly after we placed it on our site, and that it sold way faster than some of the other cute items we have uploaded. One thing I'm wondering is which one of our items will sell next!

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Thrift Flips Week 10

This week I was extremely busy but still I got some stuff done for the project. I added to our how to sewing guide over the weekend. I wanted to do more for the project during the week but I was swamped with homework. I also had important games on Wednesday and Friday that took away from my work time. One thing I did during the week was ask my friend Sophia the best tricks for Depop. She sells a lot of her clothes on Depop and I thought she could be helpful for pricing my clothes and photographing them. We agreed that she would come to my house next weekend, so that is when we will lock in and put the clothes up on Depop. I'm currently thinking that I should make the prices a little higher than normal because on Depop you can send offers and negotiate prices, so if the original price is higher then their offer will still be acceptable for me. Jules and I also made a plan to do lots of work over ski week since we will both most likely be in town. We are going to go thrifting and then go to Jules' house and then sell the clothes. I am excited for this because since we have no school that week, we will actually have more time to devote to this project which we haven't had in a long time since both of us are very busy with school, soccer, and our social lives. My photo for this week is me and Sophia when she came over and we talked about Depop.

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Thrift Flips Week 9

This week I plan to sew, cut, and diy some of the clothes that I thrifted last week and then post them on Jules and I depop account. This will probably take me the whole week because sewing things takes a long time. Also, from what I've learned about Depop in the past I know that clothes usually sell better when there are many pictures of it including a photo of you in it so that people can see how it fits. This means that I will have to model the clothes sometime during the day to get the best natural lighting in my full body mirror. I want to do this on tuesday and thursday since I get out of school at 1:30 and don't have practice until 4:15 so I should have plenty of time to get all my pictures taken and post the clothing onto our account. This week I should probably also add to our how to sew guide because I haven't added to that in a while. Jules has been mainly doing that while I have been mainly looking for clothes to sell. If I add to the slides it will probably be a step by step with pictures of what I did to the clothes before modeling them on myself and trying to sell them. One goal I am setting for myself for this week and the rest of the weeks is to try to have a positive mindset about this project because it will make everything more enjoyable. Currently, I dread working on the 20% project because it is overwhelming me but I know I can do it!

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Thrift Flips Week 8

Today is the first day back from break! Mr. Hinton handed the class a paper to fill out. The paper is about reflecting on our 20% progress so far. One of my goals is to be more productive in general because I feel like I have been slacking off with this project. It has slipped my mind because of break, finals, and just more urgent school assignments, but now for the second semester Jules and I really need to get stuff done since the due date is getting closer and closer. I think one thing that can help me be more productive is using class time to write my blogs, and using time outside of class to actually do work because I've been trying to do both those things outside of class which leads to the feeling of burnout and not being motivated. This week we plan to go thrifting but one set back is that we probably can't go together because I am going out of town this weekend and we are both busy during the week. I should also add to our how-to-sewing guide because I feel like Jules is doing more work than me so I feel bad. We had a discussion, and we might change our final product into not just a how-to-sewing guide, but instead a guide for thrift flipping in general. Showing our process of how we find donated clothes, revamp them, and they end up in a new person's closet. We could do the guide by first teaching the viewer how to sew since it is essential and we already have a guide for that. Then, we could show how to thrift well to find the best things. Finally, we could show how to sell the clothes and make personal profits. This week's photo is a shirt that I listed on our depop after cutting the collar off. 

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Thrift Flips Week 7

This week for our project I went off on a tangent. During tutorial on Friday I went to my art teacher, Mrs. Dee's class, and told her about me and Jules' project. She thought it was a great idea and since I knew she had many sewing machines in the classroom, I asked her to show me any tips and tricks. I think Mrs. Dee was very helpful because she is a professional. I think Jules and I will go to her room during tutorial again this upcoming week because she told us that if we bring her a "test project" she could show us how to sew fluidly. I think this is really good for us because currently, Jules and I have been learning how to sew based off of videos online but having someone there to actually show us how to do stuff is very helpful. Unfortunately, we did not work on our guide this week because we both had lots of tests and homework and we probably won't next week either because of Thanksgiving break but it is ok to take a short break from that since we have stayed well caught up so far. I went thrifting this weekend just for myself and not for the project but it made me very excited because I love thrifting. I am excited to start actually selling our transformed clothes. I will have to talk to Jules who our target market is and if we will be thrifting more for men/boys, or women/girls. Women's clothing is easier to transform in my opinion but sometimes the men's clothing is much cuter so me and Jules can think about our target market next weekend. The photo below is of my friend and I going thrifting and also selling our old clothes to the thrift store to donate to a good cause and also make some money for ourselves!

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Thrift Flips Week 6

This week, Jules and I both added to our how-to sewing guide. Jules added a slide explaining how to start the sewing machine. First, you thread the machine. Then, you select a stitch. Next, you place the fabric under the presser foot. Finally, you use the foot pedal to start your stitching. I added a slide explaining the differences between hand sewing and using a sewing machine. This allows the reader to assess which technique is better for them to use as they follow along with our guide. I added that hand sewing is better for smaller projects but is a more time consuming task. On the other hand, using a sewing machine is better for bigger tasks but you can run into more technical difficulties and they can be costly, and not accessible to everyone. Also, as seen in the image below, most clothes are made using sewing machines and since our project is about thrifting clothes and then making them better we will mostly use a sewing machine, but hand stitching can be used by us for small thrifted items like keychains and knicknacks. I saw a video that showed a girl hand sewing a design onto a plain white tank top which is also something we could do. This week I also made sure our depop account was updated because although we haven't started selling anything on it yet. I wanted it to look good in advance so that we wouldn't have to worry about that later once we start selling our clothes from December all the way through June when this project ends.

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Thrift Flips Week 5 Blog

This past week, Jules and I had a slight setback. We took out the sewing machine to practice since according to our outline that we made in the beginning for this project, we are supposed to know how to sew, and be good at sewing by the end of November. Unfortunately, the machine was kind of broken. I say kind-of because it isn’t fully broken to the point where we would have to buy a new one or figure something else out, but we do have to figure out how to fix it. It broke when we took one of my old, small, childhood t-shirts shirts to practice sewing with, and it got caught while we were making seams; turning the sleeves of a t-shirt into the straps of a tank top. One way we could try to overcome this challenge is a guess and check method trying to fix the machine ourselves. Another way we could fix this problem is to ask one of our parents, especially our dads, to fix it, because they are both good at fixing things. Finally, we could watch a tutorial on how someone, preferably a professional, fixed their own sewing machine and try to apply their techniques to our own caught seam. Looking into the near future, I am out of town this weekend which isn’t great because we usually do our sewing/work on the weekends. This challenge can be easily overcome by doing our work either during the week, or just catching up next week while writing our week 6 blogs.

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 Thrift Flips Week 4 Blog

This week we have been adding to our sewing how-to Google slides presentation. Last week, we only had an outline of what the slides were going to look like. We had imported a theme from slides-go and created a table of contents. But now, Jules and I have drafted a slide for hand-sewing and the sewing machine because they will both be used while we thrift flip our clothes. Our guide mostly focuses on machine-sewing because that is our main thing we're using. Personally, I looked in my house for materials for sewing like pins, needles, and thread. I have many materials which will help us. For our guide, we assumed that everyone would also have these basic materials if they were trying to learn to sew. To further the reader’s understanding Jules added a slide explaining the different parts of the sewing machine. We are also thinking of adding some sort of video explaining the components using Loom which we already used for our intersectionality projects. The reason we would need a video explaining further in depth is because some parts of a sewing machine are hard to understand like a seam ripper and bobbins. Seam rippers are small tools to cut and remove stitches, and bobbins are cylinders used to hold thread, yarn, or wire. We think a video would be a good idea because some people are visual/hearing learners and a video could be beneficial for them. This is also a good switch-up from just using slides which can get boring.

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Thrift Flips Week 3 Blog

This week, Jules and I started making our guide. We started the first section for how to sew, and will continue making it showing all the steps of the process. The first section of the blog is how to sew. The next section is thrifting. The third section is selling, and the last section is final profits. This guide will be our final product so we have to do many trial runs on the sewing to perfect how we teach others. It will also be documentation of our own journey of learning, so it will be a beginners guide. We plan to make it relatable since we are also learning alongside our guide readers. We feel that the sewing section is the most important part because it is the foundation of our "business." If we don't learn to sew well, then no one will buy our thrifted clothes that we transformed. We are using google slides to make our guide, because it is a platform that we both know well and it is easy to add photos and words explaining what to do.  To add to this guide we will probably do another trial sew at Jules house this week before we teach everyone how to sew. We can take small video clips to add to our guide and vlog to help people follow along. In addition to all of this our slides will be visually appealing. We are excited to begin our how to sew section of our slides, after using this week to plan, and set up the slides.

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Thrift Flips Week 2 Blog

This week I set up our Depop account that we are going to use to sell the items that we thrift and then flip. The reason I made the Depop instead of Jules is because I have a current Depop account that I don't really use, but I have good reviews and some followers so that will help us get started by having a little bit of a platform/following already. We sewed one time this week and it went pretty well considering it was our first time. We sewed two of my old shirts that I don't wear anymore just to practice different techniques. We used the videos we watched last week as a guide to follow along to. We made one of the old shirts cropped which was pretty easy because we only had to cut the bottom half off. The other shirt we tried to transform into a tube top (top with no sleeves) and it looks okay but we definitely need a little more practice. One thing we could improve is the cleanness of the seams because if they aren't finished well it looks janky and flimsy which is not what we want. Also, since Jules and I are planning to make a vlog, Jules looked for an old digital camera in her house and she found one. This will allow us to not spend any money on a camera and once we start doing the actual thrifting and sewing for selling we will have a good camera to film/document our journey on.

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Thrift Flips Week 1 Blog

For the first week of our 20% project we went to Jules' house and looked for her old sewing machine in her garage. Thank god we found it because this means we won't have to spend any money from our allowances to buy an expensive machine. We also began looking at youtube video tutorials on how to sew. We drafted a plan to sew some of our old clothes that we don't mind ruining as practice before starting to thrift clothes and sew those. We plan to do this next Sunday. Something helpful is that I already know how to hand-sew so using the machine should be pretty self explanatory. From the videos we learned that seams should be aligned and clothes should be straight not wrinkled for less chance of making errors. Jules and I both have lots of sewing materials including needles, string, thread, and buttons. This allows us to save more money because we don't have to buy anything new. I am excited to learn how to sew because that is the first step in our plan, and it will be crucial because every item we thrift will most likely require sewing or cutting before we resell it on Depop. Finally, I have a friend who is extremely interested in fashion and makes a lot of her own clothes so if we get stuck we could ask her for help. She doesn't live at home anymore because she is in college so she won't be able to hands on help us, but I could always call her for assistance.