Quote Card craft

I turned today into Swaping Updating day.  I had a few e-mail swaps that I needed to read and rate, a few letters that had been typed but needed to be printed out, the Blog swap to finish up and the Quote Card to do.  Plus, I had to update my swap ledger with new swaps that I'd joined, new ones I was watching, dates I'd sent and received swaps... all sorts of goodies like that.  And I managed to finish all that I'd planned on doing.

The Quote Card was the first actually crafty swap that I'd worked on since I restarted with the swaps.  Everything else has been either e-mail, online or letter swaps.  Well, a couple journal swaps that I'm working on, but those are still mostly writing.  I was a bit nervous, but I liked the idea of sending a card with a quote on the outside and the reason for it on the inside.

Originally, I was going to use Spider Robinson's Callahan's Law, but as I was going through my craft things and reorganizing them, I found two quote stamps that I had bought before and really liked. So I decided to use one of those.  The one I chose was "Making the decision to have a child is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have your heart walking around outside your body." by Elizabeth Stone.  Because it's incredibly true for me and the boys.

I decided to focus on child-like additions for decorating the card.  I used a fabric patch, some pink and blue card stock, a couple buttons and a few stickers.  It took me about 30 minutes to put everything together.  And when I was finished with both the outside and the writing on the inside, I let the boys' "decorate" the top inside of the card.  (It was acceptable for this, per the host of the swap, and they were wanting to me with it.) Anyway, I took a few pictures of the finished craft and wanted to share it, since I'm proud of how it came out.

It's a bit faded out, but it gives a general view of the card as a whole.

Not quite as faded, but a bit blurrier.  You can see some of the parts that you weren't able to see on the picture above.

This is the left side of the card. Along with the stamped quote, I included a Belle sticker and a Transformers sticker.  The "All my love" is a shiny sticker.

This is the right side of the card.  For the right side, I took two pieces of card stock and trimmed them to the correct side.  I had the two stick on buttons so I decided to put them at the edges.  I loved the "peek-a-boo!" fabric sticker.  It came in a bag of random crafts stuff from Big Lots.

You can't see it too well because of the fading, but along the blue card stock is a rub-on that says "little one".

And this is the "artwork" that the boys did.  They both wanted to use their letter sticky notes in it and Teddy tried to write both their names.

So that was my first bit of crafting after quite awhile.  If anyone has suggestions on better ways to make cards or other kinds of swaps I should join, I'd appreciate it.

On a slightly different note, I'm thinking that I may make up a scrapbook of swap things that I get.  Or maybe a binder or something.  Especially since I'm doing a lot of writing swaps and most of them have been typed rather than hand-written and I can print them out for the book.  I'm worried that a scrapbook would get too crowded too quickly, with the large number of swaps and things I'm doing.  But I like the thought of adding decorations to it that are a little more difficult with a binder, I'd think.  So anyone that has suggestions on this, I'd appreciate it.