Where have I been?

It's been almost a month since my last post, so where have I gone? Let me fill you in, with some pictures too. That being said, this may get lengthy, but please stay with me :o).

As you recall, I had to make 350 wedding invitations for my mom's cousin's daughter. They are done and have been put into the mail as of April 17, yeah!! Prior to that I had some other projects that I needed to take care of, including swaps for Minneapolis Regionals, swaps for a local scrapbook group I belong to, swaps for a SCS swap I signed up for, swaps for my SU! meeting and then design and prepare for a SAS for 5 people.

For the scrapbook group I belong to, we have monthly challenges and then meet once a monthly to share our designs. For Christmas, our challenge was to create a 6 x 6 page of ourselves to swap with the other members, so we would each have a page of everyone in the group that participated (I think 11 people did). Well, being behind as usual, I didn't get my done as and a matter of fact didn't get them done until the night before our last meeting in March. Most of is it non-SU! and is actually from Close to my Heart (gasp!). I did use the SU designer label punch and hardware though.



And then I had to finish up (and start) my monthly challenge page. March's challenge was to reduce, reuse, recycle anything onto a scrapbook page. Since this was also last minute, I used the packaging from the wedding invitations that I was making to make a 12 x 12 layout of a before and after picture. The background was created by using the stickers on the packaging for the paper and the letters and matting were from the packaging from the sticky strip used to add the pocket to the invites.



I have already posted my SAS samples here, and they were a hit, mostly. At the last minute I decided that everyone might now want 5 of the same wedding card so I made it optional to use other stamps as the focal point, which created some chaos. Also, I have a question for you guys. When I prep for my SAS I always cut the minimum size piece of paper needed to use the punches, but not everyone has the same idea as I do when it come to placing the images for punching and I always end up giving more paper when they run out. How do you handle this situation? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I previously posted some examples for my SCS swap (March 17 and March 29), but they ended up being my Minneapolis Regionals swap because I just didn't have time to create for that, so I had to create new swaps for the SCS swap. I combined one of my swaps for the SCS swap with my SU! meeting swap by using the same design, but different paper, so I had enough for both. Below are the combined swap for SCS and my SU! meeting and then the other swap for the SCS swap (I had to make 50of each design).





Finally, with everything done, I went on vacation. TC was stationed at Fort Bliss as he prepared to deploy to Iraq (left April 30 for Kuwait and to Iraq) and he had a four day leave April 21 through the 25th, so I flew down to El Paso for the week to spend it with him. I won't go in the details of the trip, but we had nice weather and had a good time. We also spent a couple days in New Mexico, including seeing the White Sand Dunes that we got to sled down. Here are a couple of pictures from that excursion.



Whew! That about sums everything up. I do have a few last catch up things to work on, including my COTM exchange which I am about 15 days late on now and then a WOW swap for convention that I'm participating in remotely. No convention for me this year, but hopefully next. I would also like to get some things together for some more classes, since no one signed up for my last class. And let's not forget the make over of my dinning room to a craft space...

I didn't post recipes, to try to save some time, but if you have any questions, please leave a comment and I will get back to you. More will be posted later today!