Kim Ritchie has developed a wonderful product she calls QSnap Huggers (Blogroll). What’s a QSnap Hugger? Well, I’m thrilled to tell you! I’ve been hugging my QSnaps for about a month now, and our relationship is better than ever. It’s true what they say — if you just reach out and give a hug, you start getting hugs back. Sometimes when you least expect them. Oh, sorry, wait … that’s from something I’ve been working on with my nephew.
On the other hand, I think it still applies; otherwise, I would have just deleted it outright. Or maybe not — you all know by now that I like to try being a little funny. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I really fail. Anyway.
QSnap Huggers have several purposes. One is to help keep the edges of your stitching fabric from getting soiled, and as each QSnap Hugger is fully machine washable, it’s easy to make sure you always have a clean QSnap Hugger to use for your latest project!
Another reason to use a QSnap Hugger is because if you hold your QSnap in hand, they may make it easier for you to grip the QSnap itself — whether because the fabric is softer, warmer, or doesn’t move as easily as the QSnap “snap.” Here’s the hug part — my hands feel like my QSnaps are hugging me back when I use my QSnap Huggers! Okay, maybe I’m pushing the humor a little, but they do help my hands feel better … and that means I can stitch longer — and THAT is worth what quite a few hugs feel like, no kidding around this time.
QSnap Huggers are also a great way to manage that extra 3 inches (more or less, as the case may be 
) of fabric around our stitching; you just tuck all of that into your QSnap Hugger, which keeps it nicely neat and out of the way. No more accidentally stitching through any of that extra fabric (oh, come on, I can’t be the only one who still did that, even after over thirty years of stitching, until I learned my QSnaps like to be hugged just as much as I do?), no more constantly losing a thread from your fabric edge (or stitching it to the back of your project, which I also used to do frequently before I learned to hug my QSnaps), and no more of your favorite pets sitting on your lap or beside you thinking they ought to be able to use that piece of fabric sticking out in their direction for batting practice, as a chew toy, or even, as much as we’d love them to really give it a go, to practice stitching on themselves (funny how when you give them their own piece of fabric, their interest completely wanes once you are no longer seemingly attached to it). Can you tell that this is my favorite reason for QSnap Huggers?
Finally, of course, we decorate all of our other stitching accouterments — our scissors get fobs, our tape measures get stitched cases, our needles get oodles and oodles of lovely stitched needlebooks … heck, some of us actually started justified starting started our scissor collections so we’d have a way to display our scissor fob collection. So why wouldn’t we also want to decorate our QSnaps?
They come in a variety of attractive fabrics depending on what Kim has available at the time — you might want an entire set which matches, as I did (and I plan to stitch pretty little labels for them so I can easily tell which size they’re for … although I’ll probably end up waiting until several designers have released patterns for just that before I manage to get around to it, knowing me!) or perhaps you’ll want different fabrics for each size of Hugger to help you tell them apart. Or, if you have some fabric of your own that you really like, Kim will work with you to have you mail her the fabric and give you individualized pricing.
Kim’s prices on her QSnap Huggers (using fabric she provides) are exceedingly reasonable:
6″ X 6″ - $5.00
6″ X 8″ - $5.50
6″ X 11″ - $5.75
8” X 8” - $5.75
8” X 11” - $6.00
11” X 11” - $6.75
11” X 17” - $7.50
17” X 17” - $8.50
For orders above $50, Kim also offers free shipping! Otherwise, her US shipping costs are just $1.50 for the first QSnap Hugger and $.50 for each one thereafter. International buyers are welcome and should contact Kim directly for more information on shipping costs. Kim accepts PayPal (sorry, no credit or debit cards), personal checks, money orders, or concealed cash as payment.
Additionally, because October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, Kim has picked out eleven pretty fabrics with some kind of pink goodness in them and promised to donate 20% of the price of every QSnap Hugger made in one of those gorgeous fabrics to Breast Cancer Charities. Isn’t that fantastic! Look at this cute pattern with the pink ribbons hidden among pretty flowers:
The only problem is, we are already 86% of the way through the month of October, yet only $1.15 — yes, you read that right: one dollar and fifteen cents — has been raised toward Breast Cancer Charities. 
Okay, actually, it’s just a little more than that because I just sent Kim a small order myself, but it’s for an odd size, so I’ll have to wait for a quote rather than being able to tell you exactly what the amount is that she’s raised toward Breast Cancer Charities. But I know we can do better than this.
Dear readers, I’m not making any money off of Independent Needlework News yet (I’m working on some ideas for that, including getting Google Ads up here, but first I want a different template … anyway, I digress [hi, Dennis, leave me a note if you get this ] … back to the point —>), or I would offer to match the total amount Kim raises to help the cause. Especially because it’s a bit more personal to me than any of us EVER want it to be, and I still can’t get any real answers around here (it’s those flunkie doctors in this state). Next year, I hope to be able to do some type of fundraiser myself, and in fact, I am already working on the plans for it. I believe when we cure breast cancer, we will also have found the cures for — or at least made huge strides toward finding the cures for our other swift and sure footed killers — ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, and cervical cancer, as well as all of those other horribly painful female conditions, (several of which I have lived with myself for many, many years) like endometriosis, adenomyosis, fibrocystic breasts, and uterine fibroid tumors that are considered “benign,” but which I know from experience certainly don’t feel anything like “kind.” In fact, at least some days, they feel as malignant and painful as any of those terrible female cancers — and that is one of the many reasons we have got to find the cure for breast cancer.
So please, don’t just think about hugging your QSnaps today … Do it, and help at the same time to make it possible for all women to hug our great grandmothers, our grandmothers, our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our aunts, our cousins, our daughters, our friends, and all of the men in our lives who love us so much and who have sat by and watched too many of us suffer, struggle, fight, and even die.
Please, buy at least one pink fabric QSnap Hugger this month — just one. Get one in your most often used size QSnap, and if you don’t like it as a QSnap Hugger, perhaps you can find some alternate uses for it — it might work as a decorative casserole dish wrap, for example. But I’m certain you’ll like it as a QSnap Hugger, I think your QSnaps deserve a hug, and I KNOW YOU deserve a cure for breast cancer. Someday, we will find that cure, we will win, and it could be the QSnap Hugger YOU buy that puts us across the finish line. Imagine that.
“Giving your QSnap a hug never looked & felt so good.” (copyright 2007, Kim Ritchie, along with all pictures in this article)
Technorati Tags: QSnap Huggers, October, Kim Ritchie, breast cancer awareness month, breast cancer
So please try to consider traveling instead of having it in your back yard (unless you’re already located in a really good location with a great airport 
). The location needs to be within a four to six hour drive of most of the rest of the midwest to be “perfect,” and it must have a really good international airport. (Why international? Because we want the Stitching Jubilee to be able to bring us designers from other countries to teach classes, too, and because there are always a good-sized number of stitchers from around the world who manage to travel to an event such as this if they are provided with the requiremed means to do so; we certainly don’t want to leave those stitchers out because if they can afford to travel to this event, then they can probably also afford to spend money on classes and in the market to help make it a rousing success! 
