Swap-Bot Saturday (On Sunday)

I've been busy trying to get several swaps out on Monday.  At the moment, I have six... yes, six... swaps ready to go with Rich to be mailed off.  I've been a busy little Amber.

There are two, in particular, that I'm proud of.  One is the 2011 Reading Log for the first quarter.  I always try to add a bit to this one, going for hearts.  Most of the people I get these reading logs from send short reviews of the books.  Which are great and I love reading what they think!  But I actually pull my entries from the reviews that I do here.  Pictures and everything.  I put them into a document file, clean them up so they look nice, and send them off in a book format.  Granted, I don't go overboard - I buy a nice plastic report cover (this one, actually) and put it together.  This time, I even included a table of contents and an introduction.

The front page.

The Table of Contents

The introduction

You can't see as well through the frosted front, but this is the whole thing put together.

I had to make two of these and, personally, I thought they came out wonderful.  They totaled 40 pages - and yes, I printed front and back to save paper!

The second one that I'm particularly proud of is for a Six Word Memoir swap.  We need to send our six word memoir to 3 partners on a postcard.  The postcard can be store bought or home made, but it has to have the words on it.  I chose to create my own.

First I took my postcard base and measured some 8 x 8 scraps that I had.  I cut the scraps to fit the postcards and double-sided taped them on.  Then I took some pretty journal tabs that I got from a swapper recently and used one on each postcard.  Onto the journal tabs, I used my same sticky double-sided tape to put on the six words, printed out and cut with heartstring scissors.

This was the result:

Lost Heartache, Then Found True Love

I think it really came out pretty.  It's work that I'm proud of.

The other four swaps that I've got aren't ones that would be good for pictures.  One is a Tea swap, where I get to send some tea to one partner.  One is a calendar in which I've circled 30 different days and included memories of those days.  The third is a list of 10 things that I love about my kids, sent to two partners.  And the final is a springtime card swap.  I'll be sending a card created by a friend of mine, Camille Engel.  She paints beautifully and she gave me a set of cards with her paintings on the front as a birthday gift.  Since they're so beautiful, I'm sending one to a partner with a note about what spring means to me.

This next week, I suspect I'll be working on journals.  I have several that I'm in the midst of - my randomness journal, the resend for the 30 day journal swap, my Week in the Life... journal and my media journal.  That's a lot of journals to work on!  Plus I'm doing my daily doodles for the two doodle-a-day swaps I'm in.  I only have a couple other swaps due this week, so I look forward to spending a lot of time on the journals. Especially since I'm going to be spending a lot of Friday at the doctor's with Rich (nothing earth shattering, no worries).  Times like that give me time to work on some of the things I love to do though.

Swap-Bot Saturday

Most of the swaps I've been working on this week have been online swaps.  I've posted most of those earlier in the week.  I also managed to update/redo my Swap Register so I can keep track of what needs to be sent, what needs to be rated, etc.  And I've updated my Swap Calendar so I know what's coming up with things as well.

Today, I went to Hobby Lobby to pick up a few more journals for swaps.  I picked up a new small craft tote.  I've been looking for something to keep my ribbon, scissors, crafting tape, etc.  This one was normally $7 but Hobby Lobby had a sale on all their crafting storage items - 50% off.  I really wasn't looking for something pink but... eh.  It'll work and that's the important part.

I also picked up more journals, since I have several journal swaps that I'll be doing over the next several weeks. I'd picked up one of these journals awhile back and used it on one of my swaps already (though I wish I could remember which one).  They were on clearance, so I picked up three of them.  I also picked up some pretty notepaper.  When I bought it, I thought it was a paper and envelope set.  Unfortunately, it's not, but I can still use the paper for letters or notes when I send things off.  I was also able to pick up more alphabet stickers and some cute ribbon, both of which were on sale.

I'm hoping that I'll get some of the journal swaps finished up this weekend.  I'll try to get some pictures of them before I send them off on Monday (if I get them finished, that is).  I'm still trying to get organized, but it's slowly happening.

Swap-Bot Saturday (On Sunday)

I've been trying to catch up on several of my swaps.  This week, I managed to get all but two of my past due swaps finished.  I sent out my Doodle-A-Day swap. I'm not a good artist, but I do have a tendency to doodle, so I put quite a few of my regular doodles in the daily boxes.  I forgot to take any pictures of the swaps that I did this week though.  I also got my e-mail pen pal swaps out. I haven't heard back from any of my partners, but since I still haven't updated the swaps that I've received, I can't complain too much.

I had a lot of fun writing my The End of the World is Coming!!! swap.  I put it as a bit of a mystery - I woke up one morning and everyone, as far as I could tell, was gone. Cars were still in the parking lot of my apartment complex, but no one was anywhere.  No one was even at the (open) Starbucks down the road.  It was just like everyone except me had disappeared.  I wrote to two friends in different areas of the world in the hopes that they were still alive.  It was a lot of fun to write.

I chose the topic of birthdays or age for my 15 quotes swap.  It's not a requirement of the swap to do it on a theme, but since I plan to keep being a part of it, I started choosing themes so I didn't repeat a lot of the time. I decided to do birthdays and age because of my birthday on Friday.  It seemed appropriate.  For those curious, this is one thing that I CAN repost.  Here are the quotes that I chose:

• "The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything; the young know everything." Oscar Wilde
• "A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age." Robert Frost
• "Last week the candle factory burned down.  Everyone just stood around and sang Happy Birthday." Stephen Wright
• "Whatever with the past has gone, the best is always yet to come." Lucy Larcom
• "The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune." Pope Paul VI
• "There is still no cure for the common birthday." John Glenn
• "The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity." Seneca quote
• "Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives." Maurice Chevalier
• "Its not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection." Voltaire
• "And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count.  It's the life in your years." Abraham Lincoln
• "Birthdays are good for you.  Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest." Larry Lorenzoni
• "I'm sixty years of age.  That's 16 Celsius." George Carlin
• "Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened." Jennifer Yane
• "Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time." Jean Paul Richter
• "To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living." Henri Frederic Amiel
• "When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do this." Mark Twain
• "Wisdom doesn't come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself." Tom Wilson"You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely." Anonymous"You're not 40.  You're eighteen with 22 years experience." Anonymous
• "Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a crime to waste it on children." George Bernard Shaw

I'm now down to only 2 swaps that are past due - Journal Newbie (which I've gotten started) and What I'm Reading.  I've got the outside of the journal created, and that's one thing that I'm planning on getting pictures of because I'm pretty happy with it.  I'm just trying to figure out what to include inside the journal.  So far, I've started with an "about me" bit.  I'm also planning on putting in some of my favorite quotes, since my partner is also a lover of quotes.  If anyone has any other suggestions of things to put into it, I'd love to hear them.

I'm hoping to write the What I'm Reading today, though I won't be able to print it out.  Our black ink is out on the printer, so I won't be able to send it until Tuesday.  But if all I have to do is print it out, I can get it out quickly.

Most of what I have due this week are online swaps, which should be fairly easy for me to get out.    Two of the swaps are book related - 30 Books To Read Before You Die and 100 Readers Questionnaire Swap.  I'm looking forward to putting both of these together.  The 30 Books to Read Before You Die swap is due on Monday and the 100 Readers Questionnaire is due on Thursday.  I've got some St Patrick's Day e-cards to send out by Thursday as well, and I get to send some jokes to partners by Friday.  The only one that I need to mail out (aside from the ones that I'm behind on) is a church bulletin for the Year of Happy Mail swap.

I've also got a lot of swaps that I need to rate.  I feel so far behind on a lot, but I will get back on track.  This week may be a bit rougher, because the boys are out for spring break, but I'll find ways to get things done.  They love to play by themselves, after all.

Swap-Bot Saturday

As I said yesterday, I had quite a few swaps that I was able to get out the door this week.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find my camera in time to take pictures of them.  However, I realized that I screwed one of them up and need to resend.    So hopefully, I'll be able to get a picture of that.  It will be a couple homemade postcards.  Most of the rest of my swaps were online swaps, which are a bit more difficult to post them.  However there is one that I will share here.  It's for the Girls Who Rock Swap.  Being the sometimes overachiever that I am, I did 20 instead of 10.  Here's my playlist, for those curious.

I also started a new group over there, Role-Players Around the World.  There didn't seem to be a lot of RPG related groups or swaps going on and, as I have several ideas for them, I thought I might as well start it up.  A few of the people that I invited have joined and I have a few others that found us on their own.  I haven't started a new Swap for it yet, but I'm considering doing so soon.  

I have several swaps that I'm getting partners for this week and that I'll be working on.  One of the ones that I'm looking forward to the most is the Lil Geeks Swap.  It's a swap more for Teddy than for me, and the little girl that we got partnered with geeks about a lot of the same things that we do.  I can't wait to go out and go shopping for her!  I've got another swap for Teddy to do as well - Kids Swap - Learning to Write.  Since we're working on his writing, I thought this would be a good one to do together.

I'm also working on getting together my quotes for the My Top 15 Quotes e-Swap.  I've participated in the two previous swaps, so the ones that immediately come to mind have been used.  But I love looking for new quotes.  to try to keep it interesting for myself, I usually stick with a theme and find quotes that fit that theme.  I haven't completely decided which theme I'm going with this time, but I do have my first quote.  I found it on a New Yorker cartoon - though it may be from somewhere else.  I've got to check into that.  The quote is "All you really need in life is the love of a good cat."  

I need to start working on the Website Scavenger Hunt Swap.  It's one that I've been meaning to put time into but haven't had a chance to yet.  I've also got to get together pictures for the Alphabet Photo Swap (FGHIJ). I did the first iteration of that one as well, so I'm looking forward to finding things with these letters to take pictures of again.

I have three book related swaps that I'll be working on: the Bargain Bin Bookswap #2: NEW to You Swap (of which I've got the book I'm sending and I just need the partner), the Hey, What Are You Reading Swap (which I'm waiting until I get my partner for on Wednesday because I have no idea what I'll be reading by then) and the 2011 Reading Log - 1st Quarter Swap (which I'm behind on because I haven't been doing my book reviews here... though I have done several of them over on Goodreads.  I may pull some of those ratings over here when I get to those books.

The last swap that I'll be getting a partner for this week is one that I've already done and just need to send out.  It's the Letter to Someone Else #2 Swap.  I spent a large amount of my last Mommy Night at Starbucks writing this letter out.  It was written to an ex that had once been one of my best friends.  Writing the letter was VERY cathartic.  I'm pretty anxious to get it out, even though I know it's not going to him.

So I've definitely got a week full of swaps coming up.  Hopefully the boys will actually have PDO both days this week so I'll be able to spend some time working on it myself.  If not then, hopefully they'll give me some other time to work on it.