My brother's wife has many high quality earrings. Some of them are gold and silver, with little diamonds or sapphires. She gets them for free.

That's because they are mismatches. People often lose one earring and then they have no use for the other one. All of her friends know that she does a mix and match thing. She has so many, that it's always easy to find two that go together well, although they are not an exact match.

Just a simple little trick, that allows her to have quite upscale jewelry on no budget at all.

I don't think this would work with shoes or dentures, but it's working quite well with earrings. Her friends also give her stray necklaces and broken bits of jewelry that are cobbled into other attractive items.

I will ask for a picture, the next time I see them.

One of my favourite necklaces used to be an earring my dad found on the sidewalk :)  

"Matching" single earrings is one of the things we do at the second-hand store where I work.  If you find a sun and a moon, a cat and a mouse, a skull and a pumpkin, etc, they can be grouped together for pennies.  With the number of piercings people have these days, people often need an odd number of studs anyway (back when I still wore earrings daily, I wore 7).  Through our recycling program, there is actually a way to divert single shoes away from landfill as well, by "matching" a left and right that are similar enough, believe it or not.  If we waste not, someone will want not.

When my foster daughter was 15, mismatched socks was a big thing, so she used to buy mismatched socks. It kind of seems stupid, but they could not just be mismatched, they had to be spots with stripes, etc.

I always wondered why, if mismatched socks became normal (at least in my house), then why not mismatched shoes?

Now, what permie person is going to set the trend?

I know Katie sure could, she has 84 pairs to chose from. She likes her shoes! She belongs to (3) Shoe of the month clubs!