Swapper's Fever

For the past three days, I've spent a lot of time on my feet opening packages and swapping out both positive and negative sets of Civil War Churn Dashes. I did them as if they were two completely different swaps, just one at a time, first all the positives, then all the negatives.

My cutting table, which is already almost completely buried in stacks of Civil War fabrics, was now spread out with all the stacks of blocks. I would deal them out like cards, placing one of each selection on a new pile. Thank goodness that almost everybody put an address label on each individual block! I tried really hard to not return any block to their original maker, and I was obsessive about my counting to avoid errors.

The blocks are just beautiful! There is so much variety in all the Civil War fabrics from all around the country. Here is the group on yahoo if you are interested in joining and possibly hostessing a swap or just swapping.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/block_swappers/

I learned from Linda, my also-a-quilter postmistress, that priority flat rate envelopes now DO include a tracking number at no additional charge since the rates went up. When I thought about how many collective hours went into making all those beautiful blocks, I refused to lose any! So for the four swappers who were sending a pre-paid parcel post, I chose to pay the $0.90 cents each to have a tracking number put on them.

We had 9 swappers plus I made ten. Most of the gals made 6 sets of six blocks each set. I tallied it up as 84 sets for a total of 324 total blocks swapped! Wheww! Boy, I'm glad to have this responsibility off my plate! I was worried that I'd goof it all up, but it seemed okay in the end. I just needed to take my time and not rush anything.

Before I could even get to the post office, I needed to give my hero, Felix, a chance to plow us out again after it snowed all day Sunday. It dropped another 12 inches on us!

Poor Matthew had to sweep the heavy snow off the cars so that I could take him in to his afternoon classes at New Hampshire Technical Institute.

Thank you so much, Matthew, and I'm sorry that I cut your head off in the next picture.

Since I needed to run Matthew in to Concord,New Hampshire to NHTI, and since the sun disappeared and left us with another grim grey day,

I decided to stop at The Golden Gese quilt shop in Concord. I didn't want to spend a lot of money, but for $28.00 I found some sale fabrics, four fat eighths, and a lonely Moda 5" charm pack.

The brown print shown above was Jo Morton for $4.50/ yard so I bought one yard of that and a yard of the pale yellowish tan Renee Nanneman for Andover. The red and the blue were Kim Diel and I just got a half yard of each of those.

Those blue scraps were $0.25 cents each and there were 8 of them that I liked.
The Moda charm pack was $9.50, and since I was there in Concord anyway, I consider that free shipping!

As luck would have it, Nancy Gesen, the owner walked in just before I left. I was able to get her to agree to advertise in the Belknap Mill Quilter's Guild program booklet for the September 28th & 29th quilt show. I was so happy because I'm in charge of the advertising for the booklet!

Here is Raven flopping around in the fresh snow.

 She just loves the snow! She'll get her wish for more on Wednesday, wheeeee!