Fabric party

Last week I hosted a special event, an “exit” party celebrating the end of my career as a college English teacher. I’m not a big partier and hadn’t hosted a party for a few years, so I was thinking a lot about how to make it fun for the ex-colleagues I was inviting. I was also thinking about how to avoid being presented with a variety of small gifts that I’d likely have no use for.  Then I had a sudden inspiration for how to achieve those two goals — I could ask people to show up with a metre of fabric. And I could tell them that in exchange I would blog about what I did with their fabric in my new sewing blog. I imposed a pretty low maximum dollar figure, told them the fabric could be new or used and waited for responses. I’m happy to say that the invitees thought it was a good idea and even the men took on the challenge with good humour.

Those are some of my colleagues, with some of the fabric offerings.

I have to say I didn’t expect that everyone would bring fabric that I liked, but I secretly knew that I could still use any that I didn’t like for trial-runs of new patterns. It was a no-lose situation 🙂

But I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed now. I like all the fabric, and I now have about 15 new projects that I’m “contracted” (in a manner of speaking) to sew and then to blog about. How about that, eh?

Has anyone else tried this sort of party? I’m wondering what other people’s experiences with this kind of event might have been?