The ATC swap at Mystic Paper last night was lots of fun. Everyone is always in such a good mood at these swaps. I look forward to their swaps all month long and I get really bummed when I have to miss one. Last night’s swap was no exception. It was great seeing all the familiar smiling faces and catching up my friends, Charlotte, Judy, Jennifer, and Kim. (Not so great seeing that Judy had a new video camera and was taking ammunition footage to post on her blog!)

Above are two of the cards I received. The first one is from Charlotte Fern. I forgot to ask her who the happy little schoolgirl is. Maybe she will leave a note and clue us in. Between the smile and the great colors this is really a happy looking card. The second card is from Jennifer and that is a picture from her own childhood gracing the face of the card. She looks like a girl who had to stand in line waiting for the photographer for way too long. She was probably missing something really important like art class and she just wanted this whole picture business to be over and done with. A girl just can’t be kept waiting for so long and still be expected to break out a dazzling smile.  On top of that, I can tell that she was way to cool to put on some girly-girl smile just to make some dumb old photographer happy.  Yeah, she was way too cool for that. I’ll bet she grinned ear to ear after this photo was taken, just to show them what they were missing.

Later today I’ll be posting all of the cards I received in the ATC Gallery but I just had to share these two darlings with you now.

I went to the Bazzill warehouse sale yesterday and came home with a box stuffed full of 12 x 12 card stock. I managed to get 117 pieces in my box but my friend, Arlynne got 134 sheets crammed into hers! That gal must have been jumping up and down on the box to get that lid to close. Way to go, Arlynne! All that suitcase packing you do must be paying off.

I was a bit disappointed that there weren’t any vellums or mulberry papers available this year. Not only was it limited to the regular card stock but the price was $5 higher. It was still a good deal. Even my poorly packed box of 117 worked out to only 17 cents per sheet. The staff was all super friendly. Oh, here is one for the “just my luck file”; when we first got there we saw a fairly long line so we decided to go check out the local Joann’s and come back a little later, thinking the line might be shorter. Wrong, it was longer. We decided we had better get into the line rather than risk it getting any longer. We stood there for about 40 minutes, loving every minutes of the Arizona 100 degree weather. When we came out there were only about 5 people in line. They are open again today from 7am - 3pm.