it's a complete and utter swap-o-rama

Do you like to get mail? No, not junk mail, bills or those other boring and/or environmentally unfriendly bits of paper that your friendly postal-person hand delivers into your mailbox? I do! So the idea of a modern penpal but with gifty stuff and changing partners seemed like great fun.

I am wary of swapping because I tend to get excited and sign up for way too many swaps, then freak out at all the work I have to do. I thought I learned my lesson so many years ago during my scrapbooking phase. But I could not resist the siren call of Swapbot. Clued in through the superfabuloso Sister Diane of the Portland flock of the Church of Craft and her most wondrous podcast, the Craftypod, I had been eyeballing the fun other bloggers seemed to be having showing off their new goodies brought to them by the good ole USPS. By the way, if you don't already listen to the Craftypod, but like crafting, talking about crafting, looking at crafts and craftbooks, or heck, have ever made a macrame owl at summer camp somewhere, then you so need to be listening to Sister Diane!

So I held my breath and signed up. Oh, the wonderful swaps going on! I immediately signed up for Lots of Mail: Cheap and Easy, a quick swap to get my feet wet. Then, I signed up for a goodie bottle swap. I had much fun doing my goodie bottle for my partner. Yes, I basically filled a pop bottle with fun stuff, stuck stamps on it and sent it on it's merry way. Here it is without it's mailing label.

goodie bottle swap

Total fun! The Lots of Mail swap has is now going on in it's fourth incarnation. If you want to join, better hurry, sign-up closes on May 3rd. It was loads of fun doing round three, and so I went ahead and signed up for round four. Basically, there are 5 themes, and you get 5 partners to send envelopes. You send each partner a different theme but it should fit in a basic envie. It's international, so how fun to get mail from overseas! Here's what I sent!

swap-bot cheap n easy mail #3

If you're curious about the themes, click on the pic to see the notes over at flickr. I also joined a tea swap. How fun is that? I got three really great envelopes just jam-packed with tea, one all the way from Portugal. I really love it! Don't you wish you had some right now?

tea-rama

Oh, and of course, my old love, crochet. Couldn't leave that one out, so I joined a granny square swap. How fun! I only had to do six squares for this swap, but I'll definitely join again so I can eventually have myself a little lapghan. I'd never really done a plain granny square before, so this is fun. Just for Ss & Gs (sh*ts and giggles for those don't know me well) I did one in a green camo with bright orange accents. That was totally awesome. Now I want to make a camouflage afghan. How funny would that be?

my grannies

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cake and crocheted squares I received

It's been a rather hectic past couple of weeks. So in the above pic, you can see a bit of the lemon cake I baked myself as consolation. Yes. It's for myself because no one in this dang house will eat cake. The reason for the stress is that A had her birthday party last Friday. If you thought it might be fun to get 25 first graders and a handful of preschoolers together for a big bowling bash, well, think again! Actually, it was fun, but just a bit stressful. Of course, being the complete idiot that I am, was unhappy with the bakery cakes that I looked at ordering. They just didn't scream bowling to me. So I had to go and do it myself. And six tubs of fluffy white icing later, it's done. Not pretty, but done. It took six to get the chocolate layer, yellow layer and the fresh strawberries to all stick together. It turned out quite tall, though. But man, were those kids ever hyper after eating that cake. Thank goodness it was Cozmic bowling, so it was dark and the cake looked much more fabulous there than it did under the bright unforgiving flourescent lights of my kitchen.

bowling pin cake

So have I recovered yet? Not completely, but I'm getting there. I still need to tidy up, finish packing the winter clothes, and get caught up on the 145 blogs that Bloglines says are updated with unread posts. See ya later!