an individual one with a $10 limit, and
a group one where we were to send something Springy to everybody else who signed up for it.
There were just a few of us for that so it wouldn't be too expensive, but we put a $1 spending limit on to be sure... and you can imagine how hard it is to be creative with a tiny budget like that.
I found some cards from the New York Botanical Garden in a liquidation store (one of those fabulous shopping moments when you can't believe your luck), and made little flower pins with felted wool sweater scraps and embroidery thread and some machine stitching in the middles:
They were sort of interesting to mail, and required bubble wrap, and I hope they arrived with uncrushed pins.
Fun as it was to make those, it was even more so to see what other people thought of - everybody had a different idea, and they were all so cool!
A magnet with my screen name on it, a bright paperclip to mark my place on the index cards I use to cart around pithy instructions for the current portable knitting, seeds for my garden that are going in this weekend now that the risk of frost is past, bookmarks (you can see one of them went to work almost immediately on arrival), tea, spring and summer themed buttons, and the sweetest knitted flower bookmark!
That one hasn't been in a book yet because I've been using it as a kind of worry bead - the petals are squishy with alpaca and they are super, super soft and soothing.
I really love the swap process. It's a bit like a puzzle, working out what the person would like and how to do it with a strictish dollar limit, but it's also an excuse to craft whatever you feel like and still have it serve a purpose, and best of all - it's like shopping for the easiest person in the world because your giftee is likely to love a lot of the same stuff you do.
So I'll post here before we start the next one, and if you want to get in on the action, you're more than welcome!
No comments:
Post a Comment