Originally Posted by butterflywing
okay....one box 12 x 8 x 4 (approximate) from the post office, is allowed to take 20 pounds. if you stuff, stuff, stuff as much fabric as you can, you can get 33 yards and 21 inches. that's with a LOT of stuffing.
flat rate overseas priority 6 - 10 delivery days, $41.95.
you're allowed 20 pounds. this much weighs less than half that. oh, plus the weight of the box.
that makes this $1.23 per pound to ship overseas. more or less. my math has never been that great.
I never got to the post office to pick up the smaller box. However, I got the dimensions of the two boxes off the USPS site and, based on the information you provided about the large box, made the following calculations for the small box:
The small box would hold (theoretically, at least) 4.5 yards of fabric, which would be just a little over one lb. The weight limit on this box is 4 lbs, so there's no way you could overstuff it with fabric.
International postage for the small box is $12.95, so shipping cost per yard is $2.87. Although the shipping cost per yard is higher than for the large box, I'm thinking that customs is more likely to believe a gift of 4 yards of fabric over a gift of 33 yards of fabric. That much fabric, especially since it costs so much in the receiving country, would look more like a commercial venture.
I am wondering if we can set up some kind of buddy system for our quilters overseas who have difficulty finding reasonably priced fabric. I'm about an hour's drive away from a cut-your-own fabric warehouse. Most of the batiks there are Timeless Treasures, which has a slightly thinner hand than Bali/Hoffman/etc., but there must be a couple of hundred different ones and they are *gorgeous*. I bought 10 yards for myself last time I was there, and it would be fun to shop for someone else. The hardest part, I think, would be trying to specify colors and print types. I could cut off pieces of my yardage to send in an envelope for samples, but I couldn't send 200 samples!