“This skein is not my best work but… It’s Merino Top plied with silk I had from Henry’s Attic. About 176 yards. OK I looked at it again, and I hate it, so I’m throwing in some merino I dyed with easter egg dyes in my crockpot- Still not fab so here’s some gray Wensleydale.”

Well ok, we all look at our yarn and think, “I wish I could send something nicer”, but then I dug in the box and saw this…

“Not my best work” AAAHHHHH!!! “I hate it” EEEEEKKKKK! What am I going to send her??? I can’t do any better than this… My panic began to grow… Then I pulled out this-

OK, at least I can compete with this skein, feeling a little better lol. Then out came the Wensleydale-

This looks almost IDENTICAL to some cotswold skeins I spun. So closely matched in color and appearance, even weight, if I didn’t know better I would have thought she broke into the house, stole it, then sent it to me in the mail. I sent that skein to someone else, so unless she burgurized her house, these two fibers are just almost the same.

Well, so I was feeling a little better. I can’t spin so nice as the first skein, YET but I felt like I could make something up she would like. She wants to make a scarf in a lacy pattern. Plus I have some really unusual and nice fiber blends, which she said she had never seen or tried. I can send some of them, as much as my heart pounds to think of parting with it…. I can do this I can. I can just give her “bonus fiber” to make up for the yarn that isn’t as good as hers. And I can send some nice little goodies, then I won’t feel like I can’t send something as nice as I got…. Then this came out…

I WANTED some of this!!! Then THIS came out of the bag.

ACK! How adorable, useful and wonderful! My ability to “wow” her is declining again… Then THESE came out-

I so needed the little mini doffer, and the book is wonderful, all those words I don’t know, explained. Her shop The Spinning Loft with all her information on this nice little tape measure.

How did she know that certain little hands are ALWAYS running off with mine?

So now I have to top this somehow with my thank you gift, that’s going to take some serious doing, but even though I’m feeling intimidated, I think I can manage something comparable. I’m very crafty you know. Excuse me now, I must be going shopping for something special for my very generous and beautiful pal Beth.

Unfortunately there has been a lot of problems with missing emails, I assume this is due to spam filters. So we are adding some things to the next swap that will hopefully prevent this.

Being late with a package or something isn’t a big deal, but really by now everyone should have contacted their pals.  Please email me and let me know if you still haven’t heard from your pal. We will personally send out a package to you if necessary.

The next swap will be a sock swap. Thanks to the marvelous Donyale, a new regular writer, we may doing this swap this way. The swappers will be matched by shoe size/ sock size desired. So if you wanted to make a sock for your husband, or kids, then you might be able to be matched with someone else who wanted to do the same. Or it would be your sock size, if you wanted to swap socks for yourself.

Then the two pals would exchange yarns, so if Donyale was my pal, then she would send me enough yarn for her socks, and I would send her yarn for my socks. Then we would each make the socks in the size needed, and send them back. The knitter chooses whatever pattern they want to knit the socks in. So it should be very very fun.

I had wanted to do it differently, I wanted to have one knitter make one sock, and the pal make it’s mate. So you would each make one sock, then exchange for a pair. Donyale thought there might be some trouble with gauge and socks being too big or too little. However, since we could all measure our own feet, and make the matches by foot size, then they could be tried on. The other way we could around this would be to make our own sock first, then mail it off to our pals, with the yarn for the second sock. Then we could use the sock made by our pals as a guide to get a good fit. Then we would send the pair back after we completed our sock.

So what do you guys think, are you up for the challenge? We may do both swaps, one for the easier swap of making a pair of socks and exchanging, and another one where you each make one sock. That would be for more advanced/persistent sock knitters lol. This swap will be a very serious swap that will require the participants to FINISH everything and participate fully.

So do you guys think we should do both options or just one? Which would you like to do?