Jars swap ajar for JAN 2015

Last year (way back in 2014), the Facebook Quilt Bock Swap Group ran the second annual beginner-friendly year-long swap.  I was in a word "not good".  Actually that's two words & an exaggeration.  It was mostly good but just enough not good to muck up the works.  Because it was a sign-up only swap, people who missed the deadline (& yes, there are reasonable reasons to miss the deadline) sort of gummed things up as I either scrambled to find an alternate or waited until they could get their blocks in.  The further (it seemed) from the date a person had signed up, the less likely they were to actually make the deadline & so on & so on until the late blocks (or the on-time blocks that were not correct, wrong size mostly & in one instance entirely wrong blocks) were dragging well past the deadline of the next swap & then I ended up with a massive traffic jam on my dining room table just in time for year-end holidays.  I ended up making a few extra sets of alternates myself (on of them below, but missing the white-background header piece to bring them to the required height of 12.5" as apparently I never took final pictures) which was less than ideal for me & for everyone who had to wait for me.

Which brings us to now.  I STILL have some SEPT 2014 swap blocks in house!  & I am still missing some sets that far back.  Yikes, I know.  & there is still one month (this month JAN 2014) to go on this swap & at least one of the people currently signed up has been ignoring my where are your blocks messages from the NOV swap.

So.

So I have decided to open the gates & make the JAN 2014 sign-up only swap NOT sign-up only.  If you did sign up & still want to go forward with it (& some of you have already sent your JAN jars THANK YOU!) that's great.  If you signed up for JAN & want no part of it, fine. Please do let me know (in the group, in the comments of the same message that has the sign-up lists) if you can, but if not it doesn't much matter because what is here is GOING just as soon as I can get it out.  Now for the good part:  if you did not sign-up for JAN & wished you could have or if you signed-up for a previous month & missed the deadline (or sent somehow-wrong blocks) you can still jump into this one. 

In other words, what had been a sign-up only swap for JAN is now open to everyone, whether they signed up for it or not.

The deadline for this swap is in-house JAN 31, 2015 & I will not be extending it so much as one hour past that date.  Seriously, I have an overflowing laundry basket of lingering block swaps-more my fault than anyone else's, I accept but it still must go!  The mailing address is in the group under the file Mailing Label & let me repeat the blocks should be IN-HOUSE by the 31st, not in transit. 

The block directions are unchanged & can be found in the original post from last FEB.   I would encourage anyone jumping in now to limit themselves to a single set of five for this last Well Preserved swap, as it would require eleven extra people to ensure no one gets doubles of any block, but if you want to make extras knowing you will get duplicates & maybe your own back, be my guest.  All the other ordinary rules apply, SASE envelope to get the swapped blocks back, etc. 

Last & probably not least, I have decided to table any other sign-up swaps for the foreseeable future.  We will no doubt do another another time, but for now we will be sticking to the no-sign-up model (& therefore no inconvenience if a deadline is missed...except to the person who misses the deadline).