My First Craft Swap (And one for you too!)

 

Last Thursday at SnB was swap night. We have spent a lovely few months collecting and making items for our various swap partners and we were all excited to be exchanging bags and opening parcels. We had five categories of items to be placed in the bag, with each item being given by a different member of the swap group.

 

 

 

Our categories were yarn, a pattern, accessories, a handmade item and an edible/drinkable item. I was lucky enough to be the recipient of Bex's handmade item, which is the handspun, hand dyed 3ply yarn you can see to the right of the picture. It is a mixture of bluey/greeny tones and has silver sparkle running through it too.

 

 

For my handmade item, I made my partner a needle case, which was a first time make for me. I looked at a few designs and then just sort of made mine up as I went along. I think I will have to make one for me too.

 

 

 



I also made a little project bag, and a pear pincushion, but I forgot to take a picture of that. It's like the ones you can see in my sidebar though.

I find these little bags come in very handy for someone like me who always has at least three (ahem) projects on the go at once as they are big enough to contain the yarn, needles and the pattern safely. When I went to Ally Pally and my water bottle leaked inside my handbag, my knitting was safely tucked up in it's bag, which is lined with waterproof fabric and no harm befell it.

Anyhow, all this swapping gave me a real taste for another one and as it is almost my first blogiversary I have decided to host my own swap. Since this is my first time, please forgive me if I am not following standard practise, I'm hoping to appeal to other novices too and hopefully we will all muddle along together.

I am going to call this swap the Stash-Busting Swap. I have decided to limit the number of items to three to keep overall costs down. As the name indicates, the idea of the swap will be to use as much as you can from your own personal stash of resources. The key input required here is time, not money.

I am keeping the time frame relatively short as I am aware that there is a little event looming that will be keeping many of us crafters busy, so I want to get the swap completed before we are all frazzled. There will be just under four weeks to compile your parcel so please don't sign up if this doesn't give you enough time. I don't want to be the creator of head/heart aches!

The three items are:

1) Handmade item. This forms the main element of the swap and will be either sewn, knitted or crocheted, tailored to your partner's taste.  We're not talking about extremely labour intensive pieces here such as a knitted jumper or double bed spread but  it should have taken longer than a few hours to knock up. Think about the quality of item you would like to receive yourself.

2) Crafting accessories/stash items. Ideally plucked from your own stash, this will be an item/items of haberdashery, again taking account of your partner's preferences. The value of this item should be around £5.

3) Edible/drinkable item. Because we all love a little treat. The cost of this item should be no more than £3.

Once I have some swappers willing to participate I will be sending out questionnaires that will help your swap partner decide what to send you.

I will keep the sign-up list open until November 1st and will then coordinate all the details and assign partners by November 5th. It is then up to you to tailor your parcel to your partners likes and dislikes (stalk her blog if she has one).

Participants who blog will be asked to write a blog post on their parcels when they are received and non-blogging swappers will need to be able to email me pictures so that I can post them on their behalf.

As the swap hostess, I am not responsible for the content of the swap parcels, I am merely coordinating partners, but if you have any problems along the way, contact me and I will help if I am able to. I will make sure that everyone has someone to swap with, even if we have an odd number of participants.

To take part in the swap, please leave me a comment below, including your name, email address and blog address if you have one.

Please do consider taking part, especially if you have never swapped before. As a newbie to this, I was surprised by how exciting I found the whole process (maybe I don't get out enough). We all love receiving parcels in the post and when they contain something made just for you, what could be better?!

Here's to a great swap,

Beth x

Chaos

 

I don't seem to have found my crafting rhythm again yet since the children have gone back to school. The youngest is only doing two and a half hours of a morning until November, which is rather less than the three full (school) days he was getting at nursery and I spend my mornings frantically trying to fit in as much domesticity as I can so that he can have my attention in the afternoon. I have also been painting the bay windows at the front of the house (inside and out) but it has been tricky to fit this around everything else with the added element of the weather.

 

For a few weeks all my stuff was left in an awful muddle because I just couldn't get around to sorting it all out. The fact that this room is in the attic, and is accessed by a fold-down ladder which is only out when our time-share teenager is here means that it is very easy to ignore a mess as nobody can see it.

 

 

 

The need to get my sewing machine out and make some things for the SnB swap I'm participating in necessitated a quick tidy but there is still lots to do.

You can't really tell from the pictures, but there are several large Ikea bags stuffed behind the desk in the eaves space that need to be sorted out. Also when Mr Magpie brought my white drawer unit up, it got turned on it's side. I'll let you use your imagination as to the state of the drawers, in which I keep all my tiny oddments including needles, beads, ribbons and lots of other small objects. Picture, if you will, some kind of haberdashery soup and you'll get the idea. Still plenty for me to be getting on with before I can relax into creation up here.



 

I know that this yarn should really be packed away from moths and sunlight but it looks so pretty!

Just out of interest, this is the other side of the room. The bed is a double, so you don't really have to sleep squashed under the eaves, although I have done exactly that on occasion (sometimes we sleep up here when family comes to stay, we frequently play musical bedrooms in this house).

I'm actually getting quite excited about the SnB swap. It's the first time I've ever done one and I can already tell it won't be my last. This is a 'round robin' swap, consisting of five rounds. Every few weeks we pass the bags along having placed in our item for that round. There are five rounds altogether. Week one was yarn, week two accessories, last time it was a pattern and this week a handmade item (hence the need for me to sort out the craft space). The last item is something edible or drinkable.

 

None of us know who is getting what for who and the rounds mean that we get to choose things for five different people and our own bags will be a deliciously varied mixture, but hopefully chosen with the recipient in mind. I can't show you what I have made for the handmade round until the swap is completed but it was something new for me and I may now have to make something similar for myself.

 

My knitting is coming along well and will hopefully be finished soon. I even found some foam blocks at a charity shop last week which I'm reliably informed are brilliant for blocking on (more on that another time).

 

My Smoothie-hat knitting also got me thinking about trying to knit some hats for the Magpies again (questionable results achieved last time a few years back). I fancy trying to knit 'in the round' and need to have a play with some different techniques. If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it. I'd also like to hear about any other hat disasters because it will make me feel better.

 

Thank you for reading, it's been lovely to have a little catch up,

 

Beth x