Calling all craftsy, artistic and creatively inclined people: the Desert Bus 2010 Craft-Along is here! Desert Bus 2010 starts November 19, 2010, and it’s time to start preparing.

That’s right, in this blog post you’ll find Craft-Along guidelines, contact information and even an instructional video from the Desert Bus cat-girls themselves. Can you handle it?

Here is how you can participate, in three easy steps!

1) Make your craft. Please email [email protected] to let us know what you’re making though. If you have any questions or concerns about what to make, the appropriateness of a particular craft or idea, or anything else you wish to discuss with us, we’d be happy to discuss it with you. We’ll also provide you the address you can send your craft to when it’s done!

2) Ship your craft in recursive packaging. We want to minimize the time we have to spend packaging and shipping prizes, in order to maximize the time we can spend on camera during Desert Bus, entertaining you with silly songs and crazy dances. To this end, we ask that you double wrap your stuff before shipping it to us. For example, put your craft in an unaddressed, unsealed envelope. Then put that envelope into a larger envelope on which you will write our address and your return address. Then ship it. Or, put your craft in a box that has plenty of blank space for us to write on, then wrap the box up in paper and write our address on that. This way, all we have to do is remove the outer layer of packaging, address the inner packaging to the auction winner and ship it. Then we can get right back to the business of making you laugh at our outrageous antics.

3) Once you have shipped your item, go home and send us another email. In this email please include:

• Your full name (If you would like your craft to be credited to a nickname or forum name instead, please notify us of this in your email.)
• Your full mailing address
• What your item is
• If you have one, the url for your website, Etsy store, Deviant Art page, or anywhere else you post photos and examples of your work. We will include this link on www.desertbus.org so that people can see more of your amazing work.

Send this email to [email protected]

DEADLINE: Your Craft-Along item must be received by us no later than NOVEMBER 1, 2010 in order to be included in the Craft-Along. We strongly recommend that you mail your item several weeks ahead of time, in case of delays or general post office screw-ups. Stuff happens.

Points of Interest:

The Craft-Along will function a little bit differently this year. All but a few Craft-Along items (selected by intensive review and several committees – which really means selected by the illustrious Rosco P. Jangles IV, possessor of Canard Knowledge) will be displayed in silent online auctions over the course of Desert Bus.

All Craft-Along items, along with all other Desert Bus prizes and auction items, will appear on www.desertbus.org a couple weeks before the start of Desert Bus, for your perusal and to build drooling anticipation.

With Gratitude:

We’d like to say a special thank you to all the wonderful LoadingReadyRun fans and forumites who, entirely of their own volition, began the wonderful Craft-Along tradition last year. You guys are awesome! We absolutely cannot wait to see what amazing arts and crafts you will come up with this year!

That’s everything – now go get crafting!