A Birthday gift along/swap – would you be in?

Blog 20 Comments

Hi there, this is an idea that I’ve been toying with in my head for a while and I’d really like to put to you and see if any of you are interested in doing this.

The history or back story is that a few years ago I participated in a birthday gift along and it was so much fun.  This was a big group of knitters that was divided up into smaller groups of 10-12 knitters and so basically each month I would send a birthday gift to someone in my group and then in September when my birthday finally came, I got all those knitting related gifts. I think I haven’t had so much fun or gifts on a birthday since I was a kid!!!

And so I’d love to do this again. I’ve been on Ravelry and I didn’t find any I could join nor did I find a Christmas swap or mystery Santa swap I could join either. I guess I’m a little late waking up to this as everything seems to be already closed for entries. So I thought maybe I could organise this myself.

So the idea would be for a birthday swap/gift-a-long for 2016.

How would this work? Well to begin with, anyone interested in joining please leave me a comment below and hopefully we’ll get enough participants to do this. Don’t worry about having to send out multiple gifts each month as my blog is still fairly unknown and read only by a select few knitters such as yourself:) Also, if I did manage to round up a huge number of participants I would divide them up into groups of 10-12 so you would be sending a gift a month on average. You would have to accept international shipping as my readers are from all over.

So if enough people are interested in joining, the next step would be for me to send out a mini questionner for each one of you asking for: your full name and postal address, information about your crafty life (are you a knitter/crocheter/spinner or maybe all three), do you have a favorite fibre/yarn/yarn weight/color? What sort of projects do you mostly do? Are you a gourmet (would you enjoy a little candy maybe with your knitting)? Do you read books and if so what type of books (mystery, thriller, sic-fi (we could include a paper back with the gift) ? Are you a geek? (Dr Who, Star Wars? etc

So a questionnaire so that the other participants can get to know you a little and better chose your birthday gift. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on each gift. You could gift a yarn from your stash, a paper back you’ve enjoyed but won’t be reading again, a set of stitch markers you made yourself and so forth.

I think we could maybe decide upon an approximate amount for each gift so we all “give equally” sort of. Also I could either open a thread on Ravelry to keep track and let you share pictures of your birthday gifts or we could do it here on the blog.

So what do you think? Would this be something you’d enjoy? Let’s say I give you until November 20th to think about it and then I’ll see how many are interested and could go on to making and sending out the questionnaires. (I admit that even if there are less than 10 interested I just might go ahead with it anyway just because I enjoyed it so much that I really want to do this again).

So think this over and let me know if you want to join. And remember, yes you do have to send a gift every month or so but think of all the fun picking the items for each new friend and last but not the least, think of YOUR birthday and all the goodness you can expect to get 🙂

On this note, I’ll leave you to contemplate my offer. Take care until next time

20 thoughts on “A Birthday gift along/swap – would you be in?”

  1. I am interested! I participated in a secret sister thing on facebook, but come to find out it was some kind of scam or something. Anyway, I hope my “sister” enjoyed her gift from me!! I do live in America, so maybe you could provide tips on shipping too. Sounds fun!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  3. I’d love to do this! You may want to start a CLOSED group on Ravelry and send out invitations. This way- we’d have a place to post pictures when our gifts come; but you wouldn’t have to coordinate 10,000 people.

    Also you may want to indicate shipping preferences. I don’t mind shipping anywhere, but some people may not want to ship to Canada or Australia… you know- things like that. Oh and allergies. I have a cat, and while he does not play with my swap items- a stray hair will probably ride with the package. Unavoidable.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  8. Pingback: Pattern bonanza or the Indie Designer Gift-a-long 2015 | knittinginfrance

  9. Am I still in time to join in this fun? I would like to join all this great fun and wonderful surprises, I love gifts and sending out gifts.I’m fairly new to knitting and crocheting compared to others but hope that’s ok? Only as some have mentioned already before, I think it’s important to also keep an eye on the financial part, to not make it too expensive. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  10. Pingback: The twelve days of Christmas and the 2016 birthday game | knittinginfrance

Leave a comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.