Yep its nearly Shwop time again – just over one week to go until our Auckland event (yehaaaa!), so we have been very busy getting everything ready – sourcing coat racks and organising hundreds of hangers for all the wonderful clothes that will be shwopped.
Any one who has had the pleasure of dealing with the necessary beast of coat hangers will know what devilish and unruly things they are to handle. The hooks have a crazily developed habit of grabbing on to any other hanger (or anything at all) within reach, the arms are obsessed with tangling and intertwining with other arms and themselves, and to make matters worse the little hooky things that appear on some of the arms of hangers join in to add extra cling-on power to the mix. What you end up with is a monstrous frantic birds nest of wire and plastic that seems to get worse the more you wrestle with it. Here is an example of what I faced yesterday:
As you can see this seemed like an utterly impossible task to make order of this chaos, but armed with some good Shwop determination, a few spare hours and a packet of trusty coloured rubber bands I bravely faced the birds nest tangle. By plucking them carefully one by one from the heap and sorting them into bundles of 10 as I went, and restraining them with rubber bands on each end and on their hooks I managed to tame them into manageble piles to be boxed up. They seems to respond quite well to a stern tone of voice and a few profanites here and there to let them know who was the boss!
Result – 400 tidy, quietened and organised hangers – thank goodness!
What a delightful sight:
This weekend its on to sewing a 200 metre long pink material rope. Ah the curious crafty things we do in the name of the Shwop! What fun 😉
Bring on next Saturday!!
Inga
The Big Shwop 
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