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