Swaps with good blogger friends are anyway! More on that in a minute. First let me tell you that blogging is going to be sporadic for a while. One reason is that it’s getting tough getting to my computer. For one thing she won’t turn on when I push the button anymore. It takes about 6 times before I get it just right and she decides to start up for me. ARGH!!
We’re also in the busy stage of the house right now. We’ve been spending lots of time with the builder and the architect getting the plans just the way we want them. I’m pushing for a vacuum in the walls and a laundry chute from the bathroom on the second floor going all the way down to the basement so I don’t have to worry about carrying everything down the stairs. Of course we also need two sky lights so that we have lots of light coming in, oh the list goes on and on. In two weeks, during Easter break, we are going to be heading out with the interior designer to pick out the floors and walls which should be lots of fun. I hope. Up until now it’s been pretty easy, except of course deciding which side the windows should open or what size the muttons should be. Can you imagine, it took us a good 6 hours to make these decisions? We have to decide on everything! Thank goodness the door knobs and front door were easy picks.
OK enough house talk for today, let’s get to some good stuff. As I’ve told you already, I’ve been collecting things for a few months now for two swaps I’m involved in. Unfortunately, in the past I did a swap and was pretty disappointed in how things turned out, so I decided anonymous swaps, or swaps in general, were just not for me.
That is until Fluffy Knitter Deb and Dk from Nautical Knitter both said something about wanting Wollmeise yarn. They didn’t have any and me being at the source of the gorgeous stuff thought no problem, let’s do two swaps. Well, this was before naive me found out that Wollmeise is now like oil, hard to come by and expensive on top of it. I decided these two blogger friends were absolutely worth it and suggested maybe right after Christmas. Well, I collected little things here and there (a sheep cookie cutter and handmade wooden shawl pins from the Christmas market) and then I went to buy the yarn. No deal! Wollmeise was down all December and January. Everyone is buying her out which makes it hard for us poor Germans to buy any! Well, I kept putting off the swap for another month or two until I could finally get some of the gold and two weeks ago I finally managed to send out the packages.
I don’t have time to knit for anyone but I think any good package must contain something handmade, so I sewed a needle case for DK:


She likes neutral colors and wine red so I thought this would be perfect for her. Tied with a black satin bow I almost kept it.
Deb and Alida (she had to have one too because “the colors are just so pretty, mom”) both got a knitter’s paraphernalia case in bright spring colors:

Alida and I also made some stitch markers to go in the packages (DK got the shells, of course):

Here are the packages just before flight:

I included a bit of lavender, a post card of a Berlin curry wurst stand, a German wooden sheep pocket game, some German crochet magazines, the obligatory German bamboo sock yarn and a touristy Berlin bag because no package is complete without a touristy bag, right?
I had so much fun putting these together according to the colors and interests of my two blogger buddies. I hope they both liked them as much as I did but I’m pretty sure of it.
The best is yet to come, tomorrow I’ll show you the goodies I got!! I’m off to buy groceries for the week and drool over our house plans one more time. Or maybe two more times.