Destashing swap...

Shortly after Tick was born I took part in a swap on Ravelry. I hadn't done any swaps for a while and the concept appealed to me - it was a swap with the purpose of only using things you had anyway and to spend as little as possible (as a kind of counterbalance to the crazy spending that xmas usually gives rise to). At the same time the parcel was of course supposed to be filled with nice things - the idea being that you shouldn't give something to someone else that you wouldn't also be happy to receive yourself.

My swap partner was in Australia so we arranged to send our parcels surface mail and to accept that we would have to wait rather longer for them to arrive (the alternative was to spend far more on postage than on what was in the parcels). I dived deeply into my stash, filled a box with yarn, fabric, some knitting needles, a pattern and some sweets. Surprisingly my parcel arrived very quickly, making me think how crazy it is that I can send something to Australia using surface mail and it arrives within 3 weeks and send something to Germany using normal mail and it also arrives in 3 weeks. What's that about?!

Anyway, the parcel from Australia took rather longer. It arrived a few days ago and boy was it worth the wait!! This is what my partner sent:



Isn't that fabulous? I love the bold colours on the big skein of yarn - it's hand-dyed! There was pretty knitting, books, a sock pattern, a cute little book for The Bean, sweets, ... I can't list it all, there were so many things. Thank you so much sthrnx, you made my day!! :-)