TThe Boy/Girl I-Spy swap is now full! Yipee!!! Shipping deadline is Friday July 20th at the very latest - the faster everyone ships, the sooner everyone gets their fabric back!

UPDATE: The swap is full!

Fabric has started arriving for the i-spy fabric swap! There are so many amazingly cute fabrics, and the charm squares are always so satisfying in their little piles.

We still have space available, and I hope the spots will fill in the next few days so we can have a quick turnaround! If you know someone who would like to swap, please pass along the links to the signup registration form and the flickr group! And if you would like a second spot, please let me know! The flickr group has a thread for that. :-) http://nutellanutterson.blogspot.com/ and http://www.flickr.com/groups/1931379@N25/

I have sent everyone who has signed up the mailing information, so if you filled out the form but didn't hear from me, please leave a comment here or on the flickr group.

I'll be headed to Fabric Depot next weekend, so I'm resisting buying fabric until then. Which was made especially hard when Fabric.com had their boy/girl sale. It's like they knew our swap was coming!

Boy/Girl I-Spy Charm Square Swap

UPDATE:
SWAP IS FULL! YAY!

The mailing deadline is now FRIDAY JULY 20th. (Unless you are international, see below). This will give our newest swappers some more time to find fabulous fabrics.

It's time for snips and snails and puppydog tails! Get out the baking supplies, because there'll be sugar and spice and everything nice, too! Yep, I'm hosting our Boy/Girl themed I-Spy charm square swap.

As for what makes a boy or girl themed fabric, well, as the saying goes, we know it when we see it. I always try to provide "gender neutral" fabrics for swaps, but my little girl loves butterflies and kittens and she has somehow become acquainted with a certain group of friends who happen to be horses of small stature. Ahem. So here's the chance to send in trucks and trains and dinosaur eggs, or sparkly hummingbirds, kittens with hairbows, and panda-bear ballerinas. (I don't think this last one exists. I think that needs to be rectified, STAT!)

This is a i-spy themed 5" (charm square) swap for two different fabrics, one "boy" and one "girl" themed, with 1 yard of EACH fabric and cut 56 5" squares, 112 squares in total.

UPDATE: This swap is now open internationally! Please buy and send your fabric ASAP if you are outside of the US. I will keep track on the sign-ups and be sure to send you my address immediately if you are international.


Please follow the fabric cutting and shipping instructions, they are there to keep everything running smoothly!

With huge thanks to Ellison Lane's "how to host a fabric swap"

Here are the fabric requirements:

For swapping 5" charm squares, each person will purchase 1 yard each of one "boy" and one "girl" themed fabric and cut each into 5" charm squares. 1 yard = 56 charms. (I recommend buying one and an eighth or one and a quarter yards- never hurts to have a little extra in case you make a cutting mistake.)

Choose a fabric that has a small enough print suitable for an 5" charms. Scale of the print is very important as smaller works better in this case. A larger print has a larger repeat and you want each charm to have enough of the print showcased on each piece. In other words, no one wants to play "I spy" with just the back half of a horse!

If you choose a larger print, please buy sufficient material to "fussy cut" squares that will show entire objects centered on the square.

Please choose fabrics that fit with both I Spy (meaning an obvious object to "spy") and that are strongly boy or girl themed.

Please NO licensed characters. Yes trains, no Thomas. Yes fairytale castle, no Princess Dora.

Fabric should be designer label, 100% cotton, quilt shop quality fabric. No Hancocks, Joanns or Hobby Lobby fabrics. For a fabric swap, the fun is receiving quality fabric that you might not be able to pick up around the corner.

Fabric must be new and unwashed and must come from a smoke free environment.
Before mailing, cut your fabric into 5" x 5" charm squares. Press your fabric before cutting. 1 yard = 56 charm squares (5" x 5".) Here's a great tutorial on how to cut fabric into charms by Elizabeth Hartman.

Please stack your two fabrics into pairs and alternate angles for ease of sorting. (If this is confusing, I will post a photo onto our Flickr group of what I mean!

Put your fabric in a ziplock bag and include an index card with your name and email address. I like to put a return address sticker inside my ziplock, it's extra insurance for your fabric!

Upload pictures of your fabric to the swap Flickr group and include the name of the fabric, designer, etc. This ensures that there are no duplicate fabrics chosen and allows everyone to find out more about the fabrics in case they would like to order more once they have received their charms.

Shipping:

Participants must include a prepaid self-addressed, stamped envelope along with their charms when mailing them to you. A very easy way to handle this is to include a SAS priority mail envelope for $5.15.

Smaller package envelopes are fine too but participants should keep in mind: bubble envelopes or tyvek work best - no risk of tearing in the mail. Self sealing envelopes are also better. It saves the hostess (me!) from having to lick and secure flaps with tape.

To figure the postage cost, have the postmaster weigh your SASE along with the charms and purchase enough postage to cover the cost. Then put that postage on the SASE and place it inside your package along with your charms. Please use stamps, as the barcode from the machine is tied to *your* post office and date!

Swapping and personal responsibility

This spring and summer I've hosted and participated in a few (um, a few too many!) fabric swaps. And something I'm realizing is that without a personal connection to the people one is swapping with, drop-outs and timeliness are real issues. And, I would hazard a guess, the quality of fabric goes down.

In particular I've noticed a lack of necessary fussy-cutting for I-Spy fabric squares. This is a real shame, because a perfect fabric can be ruined by cutting. As one swap guidelines said "no one wants half a turtle!" It's really frustrating because swapping is pretty much the only reasonable way to get the hundreds of fabrics necessary for a good I-Spy or storytelling quilt.

I think that leading into summer is also just a bad time for swapping - people are focused on getting their kids out of school, there are schedule changes, vacations, lots and lots of distractions.

I've been thinking of hosting an I-Spy swap this fall, after Labor Day. But I'm struggling with how to get participants to take the swap seriously, provide good fabric, and not come off like the Fabric Swap dictator.

In related news, I've been reading Daniel Pink's Drive, and MrNutterson has been reading Predictably Irrational. These books both center on human behavior and the surprising ways we all act. Some of the information I've learned from these books has led me to think that getting good swap participation is NOT about awarding prizes to swap participants, publicly shaming those who are late, or otherwise giving "external" motivation. If I can vastly paraphrase two entire books, it's about work being satisfying emotionally, and feeling challenged creatively.

So perhaps it will motivate people if I'm able to help participants remember that you literally give as good as you get, and that these swaps are only awesome when we all choose great fabrics and cut carefully!

Errands

The diapers sold! I'm so glad to pass along the cloth diaper love, and recoup a small part of my diaper investment. Er, well, it was used to get her large FuzziBunz, so not recoup so much as keep it going in the giant pool of (diaper) money?

In any case, this means a trip to the post office! Which happens to be HazelNut's favorite thing on EARTH. Because the post office is full of PEOPLE. And people are awesome.

I realize that I've drawn a great card on this one, as most people find the post office terrible.

I'm going to be quite the sight at the PO, though. I've been destashing in a major way and I have several things to mail in addition to the diapers. One is a package that's quite heavy. I imagine multiple trips will be in order. Yay?

And lastly, to have crafting content: I'm almost done with my Mug Rug for the Ravelry quilting swap! Once it's in the mail, I'll post the in-progress photos and show how I modified an online tutorial to suit my needs.

Selling off my CushyToosh diapers! Babby got biiiiiig.

I’m looking to sell off my lot of CushyToosh pocket diapers with snaps. These diapers are a PUL outer with a cotton “sherpa” lining, and an absorbent cotton insert.

There are 21 diapers total - originally 23, but two outers are MIA, and I will gladly send along to the buyer when they turn up! 16 are in good used condition, 4 have some delamination on the PUL which hasn’t affected their water-proofness, but is a potential problem. One is of the same color PUL as the delaminating ones, so I’m including it in that category to be safe.

Most have some staining on the lining, which I’m accounting for in the price as it doesn’t affect performance at all. However, I can try to sun this out if it’s important to the recipient. I’m not squidgy about this stuff, but I understand if someone is! All have been washed exclusively in Country Save. I also just gave them one last wash in nothing at all to be sure all soap residue, etc. is outta there!

I am totally happy with their performance, for us it’s an issue of them being a tad short in the rise for my 10 1/2 month old, 97th percentile baby.

These originally sold for $15/each, I’d like to sell the lot of 21 for (lowering the price due to lousy math my first time around!) $125, including shipping in the US. (Message me to figure out international shipping.)


Photos!
CushyToosh's back butt logo:

The entire stash. Note that there are three bright coral and two light green in the "delaminating" stack, and there's only one light yellow and one aqua due to the MIA shells.


The staining on the cotton interiors:

Back at the blog

I realized tonight that I wanted to blog again, if only to document some non-knitting related crafting that I've been doing. Ravelry is awesome for all knitting related stuff, but I have been quilting, sewing, and creating some mixed-media pieces that all deserve their own space as well.

So I'm back in the saddle, and will try to get through my crafty backlog with regular posts!