Stationary and Labels...

Okay, so I'm a nerd. I feel more motivated to do things when I'm organized. I mentioned in an earlier post about my stationary and letter folding. Anyway, I needed some stickers or labels to close my letters with and I saw these really pretty ones at Xpdex. I figured I could just make some, so posted below are the results. You can just barely see the lines on the stationary paper (just how I like it :-) ) and on top are the labels I made to seal my letters with. The images on the labels come from summertimedesigns.blogspot.com. My mom's bookstore has purchased some templates from them. I pulled the scrapbook pages into Photoshop and cropped circles out of them, turned them in PNG files and then imported the images into PrintShop 23. There's probably an easier way of doing it... but whatev.



And these are the labels I used:

3 Weeks

Time. Has. Slowed. To. A. Crawl.


LAME.


But other than that, things have been good. I found some paper I really like for letter writing. It's just a light brown, paper bag-esque type. I believe the package said "kraft" on it (whatever that means). I just bought a ream of it. I stink at writing in straight lines, however, so I made a quick template in Microsoft Word with some very faint, gray dotted lines and ran the ream through the copier. Voila! The lines came out perfect. Just dark enough for me to see and write straight :-) Since paper tends to curl/get crinkled/etc. when it's out of it's package, my mom gave me the idea of putting the ream into smaller stacks like my sister does here. I'm hoping it'll help protect the paper. We'll see. But if you get crinkled letters, um, sorry. My bad.

I started the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series yesterday. I finished book two today (they're quick reads). Fun! Thank heavens all five books are already out (and, conveniently mother owns a children's bookstore, hurrah!). Five books in five days, can she do it? Heck yes, I can. Or, at the very least, I'll have fun trying :-)

Time can speed up now.... please?

Letter folding...

So with the mission approaching, I've been thinking of fun ways to send letters. It's always nice to get a letter, but I thought it would be fun to find something unique so that when the person gets it they know it's from me, something personalized. In the course of looking up letter writing tips, I came across this web site that shows some pre-envelope letter folding patterns. They've been a lot of fun to play around with. My favorites so far are the "Fern" and "Anchor" folds. The Anchor is a bit tricky to close, but looks super cute in its small size and it very secure once it's closed (no seal needed!). If I can come up with some cute sticker seals, I think the Fern will be used quite a bit as well (I saw some at the paper store today that were circles with fun scrapbook paper looking stripes... rather than buy them, I think I'll see what I can come up with on my own). Anyway, enjoy!

www.ghh.com

UPDATE: This site takes a little bit different approach to the same idea --> www.letterfu.com

5 weeks

Actually, it's only four and a half because today is almost over. I'm getting anxious and excited. I cut five inches off my hair earlier this week. My hair was pretty long, so 5 inches didn't make as much of a dent as it sounds like it would (it still comes down to my shoulder blades). But it was the oddest thing. More than anything else I've done for mission prep, the hair cut got me the most excited. It wasn't even a big deal; no layers of anything. I just walked into Great Clips, showed her where to cut, and walked out not 15 minutes later. But it was my missionary hair cut and, for some reason, that made all the difference in the world :-)

About five minutes after coming out of Great Clips I had my language evaluation with the MTC. I'm not sure how I did. I understood all the questions asked, and I think I responded okay. The questions were mostly close-ended, so I didn't really know what else to say ("what's your favorite color?" that sort of thing). The most open-ended was the last one, "why do you want to serve a mission?" That one seemed the easiest of all to answer. It was exciting and thrilling to answer in Spanish. The lady didn't say how I did or how long I'd be in the MTC, only that she'd place me in a class. We'll see, I guess!

Wednesday I went to the Bountiful temple with my parents (Salt Lake is closed for cleaning). It was beautiful! The chandeliers are huge and, frankly, amazing. After the temple and a brief visit with my guelito and guelita (and a near death experience as some goon tried changing lanes INTO me on the freeway) I did some more mission shopping at The Gateway. I love that place. I also love the temple. Okay, so maybe as I'm writing this the whole daughters of Zion and tinkling ornaments comes to mind. At least I went to the temple first. Priorities, right?

I was meeting my brother, Pere, for lunch and had some time to kill so I spent a little while at Barnes and Noble and read these two adorable books by Patrick McDonnell:




They were delightful. The perfect read-aloud books. I also bought "Cranford" the first and second seasons. Mom and I have already finished the first and vowed to re-watch them after my mission. Joy!

After the bookstore I had a delicious lunch at Buca di Beppo with Pere. So good. Mmm, still thinking about it.

Off to do more productive things.