Exchange Experiences

I was part of get Stitchy!'s stitch marker swap a few months ago (blogged here and here). It was a great way to get my feet wet. I had lots of fun with it and a new hobby (designing stitch markers) was born. I'd never done any exchanging of anything on the Internet. After that positive experience, I felt I was ready for a bigger exchange. Baby steps, you know. I didn't want to do the whole Secret Pal thing. It intimidated me quite honestly.

A couple of months ago, I read somewhere about a stat counter for your blogs. I thought it would be cool to see from where my blog traffic comes. I had just submitted a couple of patterns to Knitting Pattern Central and Crochet Pattern Central. Those, plus a couple of others, were accepted. Most of my traffic was from KPC and CPC. From there, my patterns started showing up on all kinds of pattern resources on the Internet (including some Swedish one, I think.). One of the links to a pattern of mine was on a blog called The Spring Felted Bag Exchange. I emailed the blog author and thanked her for listing my pattern on her blog. She invited me to join. So I did.

I'm glad I did. This exchange only required two packages to be exchanged. I could handle that. I already blogged about the packages Sheilah sent (here and here). Here's a picture of the bag I sent my spoilee, Shawnee. She's a Mary Engelbreit collector. I had lots of fun making this bag. I might make more with other designs and appliques. I'm thinking a bag with an apple for the teacher would be cute. Opinions?





Well, now that I've gotten two exchanges under my belt, I've moved on to a third. It's a one-skein exchange over at Knit Knack on MySpace. I don't know what I'm going to make my spoilee there. When I do, of course, I'll post something here. So far, I have it possibly narrowed down to one of these yarns (purchased at Loopy Yarns at 70% off!!). Tell me what you think.




For the record, most of these yarns have been earmarked for winter gifts for my sisters and cousin.