Girlfriends, check out the latest post on Fractured Friendships, the blog of our girlfriend and Huffington Post columnist Irene Levine. Girls Nights On the Cheap: Staying Connected Without Spending A Fortune features us, the Girlfriends-in-Chief, dishing about budget-friendly fun for girls night out and girls night in. While you’re there, check out the rest of Irene’s blog, where she explores the nature, meaning, and depth of female friendships. We think you will appreciate her thoughtful, expert advice to women struggling with friendship dilemmas or hurts. And, look for more from Irene coming soon right here on GirlfriendCelebrations!

Do you believe Girlfriends Make Life Better™? Then you’ll want to check out the new fan page we’ve created just for our followers on Facebook. Come on over and become a fan of GirlfriendCelebrations! This is a great way for you to keep in touch with us and with other like-minded girlfriends. You can post pictures of your girls night outings, write on our wall, and see all the latest giveaways, polls, and other news. Plus, becoming a Facebook fan makes it easier to share our unique girls night party plans with your girlfriends on Facebook. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Don’t forget, you can also follow both of us on twitter. Dawn is here and Tina is here.  Read the rest of this entry »

The results from our latest poll are in, and we think you need more girlfriend time, ladies! A full EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT of you have a girls night once a month or less. As one commenter stated, “That is just sad!” It’s hard to enjoy the benefits of female friendship if you don’t actually spend time with your girlfriends. So, everybody get out those calendars right now and schedule a girls night in the next two weeks!

We are happy for the 44% of you who have a girls night once a month—that’s the largest group, and from our experience, a monthly girls night seems just about right. Once-a-month gatherings are easy to schedule in advance and not so frequent that they cause protest from husbands, kids, boyfriends, and other interested parties. About 15% of you get together with the girls more than once a month—kudos! We’d love to hear what you do when you get together. Here are the poll results: 

Thanks to all who participated. Please vote in our new poll, “How much are you willing to spend on a Girls Night?” It’s in the left-hand column. We’ll report those results in a week or two. Meanwhile, we always love to hear your comments! Read the rest of this entry »

Swapping is hot! In these tricky economic times, girlfriends everywhere are looking for creative ways to be fabulous while pinching pennies, and they’re rediscovering the beauty of swapping everything from books to jewelry to party dresses. At Girlfriend Celebrations, we’ve been brainstorming unique swap parties to help you trim the fat off your budget and nourish your soul with some girl time. We’re also looking to add your ideas to our swap-o-rama! Photo via flickr.

Our longtime readers already know about our Book Swap, Accessory Swap, and Fashion Sharing parties. Be sure to click the links and check out the party plans; they are some of our most popular parties, because they help girlfriends grab great new finds on the cheap, all while enjoying the company of friends. Here are some additional ways for you and your gal pals to increase your fabulousness without spending a dime!

Magazine Swap  

With a careful review of the budget, subscribing to new magazines is one luxury that often gets trimmed to cut costs. So why not swap magazines with your gal pals? It is a great way to recycle and reduce paper waste. While being good for the environment, it is also an economical way to read magazines that you might not otherwise spend the money on. Ask your girlfriends to save their magazines and bring them to your next girls night. It’s always interesting to see what magazines people read, too!  Read the rest of this entry »

Our girlfriends at Chicagonista are gathering a group of volunteers THIS THURSDAY, March 26 at the Greater Chicago Food Depository to help Quaker Oats launch its Go Project. Chicago blogging girlfriends, volunteers are still needed! Can you come out and help for a few hours? Read on to see what Chicagonista founder M.J. Tam had to say:

“Feeding the needy is no small feat, especially if there are 36 million Americans (including 12.6 million kids) who are hungry. But the new Quaker Go Project is making a huge commitment to feed the hungry children all over the world by hitting communities and asking for volunteers all over to come join the effort.

What can we do here in Chicago? It’s not as hard as you think.

For starters, we here in Chicagonista are helping with the Go Project launch by hosting a blogger volunteer gathering on March 26th from 1-4pm at the Greater Chicago Food Depository. If you would like to help us celebrate by joining in, please fill in our contact form and we will email you more details. Three hours of your day can help feed hundreds.  Please come and join us!”

Other ways everybody can participate: For every UPC code entered on its site, Quaker will donate 10 servings. So as you feed yourself, why not help feed others? Click here to enter your UPC codes.

You can also bring your own hunger relief idea to life. Each month, Quaker will award 20 Go Grants of $500 so people like you can develop community projects to help combat hunger. You can fill out an application here.

We know you like to support a good cause, girlfriends. Thanks for reading!

Read the rest of this entry »

Spring is here, and all those blooming flowers might make a girlfriend’s thoughts turn to…perfume. How about a girls night to explore fragrances? Help your girlfriends find a new signature scent, seasonal fragrance, or home fragrance. You can also make fragranced products together. Smells like a fun girls night to us! We had a little help from our girlfriends in creating this awesome party plan. Read on for the how-to! Perfume bottle photo via flickr

Setting and setup

You will need a clear table and room to mingle. If you are making scented products, you’ll need a workspace and materials.

Small bowls or vials of coffee beans help to clear your nose between aromas.

Snap up a copy of Perfumes: The Guide (only $6.99 on amazon) for some background on the history of perfume, plus a rating and review for all of the popular fragrances on the market today. You can even use it to create some perfume quizzes or trivia questions (for example, guess the popular perfume by reading the description). (thanks to girlfriend Jasmine from Salud Spa Bar for the tip!).

If you are making scented products (see below) you will want to purchase the supplies.

If you are sampling scents, you’ll need to acquire a selection of fragrances. There are a few ways to do this. You can purchase sample size vials from either Salud or from Luckyscents.com. (Tip from girlfriend Rachel: perfume samples are often sold in large lots on ebay.) Or, ask each girlfriend to bring her favorite perfumes and set them up for everyone to try. You can also hit department stores and request fragrance-counter samples of the hot new scents. Start a few weeks before the party and you’ll rack up a nice selection!

Set up your fragrances on a table with plenty of room to browse. Have heavy paper strips available for sampling the scents (putting them directly on the skin is ok for your uppermost favorites, but you’ll run out of skin after awhile!). You might want to have a rating sheet or note card for each girlfriend to take notes on her favorites.

Our girlfriend Rachel also suggests making these perfume sample flowers to help set the mood and use as decorations. These are lots of fun and super easy to make using perfume ads from magazines.  Read the rest of this entry »

Hey girlfriends, have you noticed our new poll in the left-hand column? We’re asking “How Often Do You Have a Girls Night Out or Girls Night In With Your Gal Pals?” RSS Subscribers, please click through and vote! We’d love to hear from you! This is a nifty new feature we’re trying from TwtPoll. We thought it would be fun to poll our girlfriends on a few topics and then report back with the results. We’ll keep the current one up for about a week, and then let you know the results. Have any girlfriendly topics you’d like to see in our poll? Leave a comment or email us!

Are you looking for party planning advice? At GirlfriendCelebrations, we often receive requests from girlfriends who need party planning tips and ideas to help create a memorable girls night. Recently, our girlfriend Renea didn’t want to gamble on creating a memorable 60th birthday party for her mom, so she wrote to us for party favor advice. Renea is planning a night at a casino for the birthday girl and ten others. She is on a budget, yet wants to be creative and loves crafts. We think Renea’s need for frugal party favors is shared by many of our readers; so we put on our party hats and came up with these budget-friendly favor ideas. The ones we’re suggesting match Renea’s casino theme, but you can adapt them to many kinds of Girlfriend Celebrations! Photo via flickr. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi Girlfriends! We have a guest post today on another blog we thought our readers would really enjoy. It’s called Healthy Beauty Secrets and it’s written by our girlfriend Duong Sheahan. A health coach, speaker and blogger, Duong is currently running a 21-day series called “Living Healthier and Happier.” We are honored that our article “Girlfriends are Good for You” was selected for day 7! (And of course, we do believe that spending time with your girlfriends will make you healthier AND happier!)

What we like about Duong is that she believes in balance -she is not a fitness fanatic, nor does she promote strict dieting. Her motto is: “Empowering women to Live Healthier and Happier from the Inside-Out…Spirit, Soul & Body.” We can personally attest that she is a lovely person inside and out. So, check our her blog and her vlogs–we think you’ll love her fascinating personal story as well. Until tomorrow, have a wonderful day and remember to schedule that girlfriend time: It’s good for you! Read the rest of this entry »

Just more evidence that Girlfriends Are Good for You…today’s Parade magazine lists “Make Friends” as one of its “7 Habits for Longer Life.” (Whole article here.) The article cites an Australian study that found people with “large social networks” were 22% less likely to die in the next 10 years than those who said they didn’t have many friends. Parade’s Dr. Mark Liponis puts friendship right up there with eating right, getting enough sleep and clean air as a factor for increasing life expectancy. Wow! If that doesn’t inspire you to make some new friends, we don’t know what will. If you’d like some advice on making and keeping friends, check out the following articles: 

Growing New Girlfriends: Some Friendly Advice

Frustrated? How to Keep Friendships Alive

And to read more evidence about the health benefits of friendship, try: Read the rest of this entry »