This week, I am being a little bit selfish and featuring my own swap, the Happy Halloween Matchbox Swap. It is a fairly self-explanitory matchbox swap: send one Halloween-themed matchbox to your one partner. There are already more than 60 people signed up – yay! – and anyone with a 4.8, or higher, rating is welcome to join. Sign up before September 30th and send your matchbox before October 15th. I always love Halloween matchboxes – they end up being so creative!

Halloween is a popular swap theme every year. Here are a few more Halloween swaps you might want to check out:

• Halloween Cupcake Toppers
• Halloween Whimsey Jar
• Halloween Card Swap
• Halloween Bookmark Challenge with a twist…
• Halloween Apron Swap
• Halloween Lucky Parcel
• ATCs for Halloween
• Handmade Halloween Postcards

I know that is not all of the Halloween swaps out there, so please feel free to leave links to more of them in the comments.

Wow. Another week completed and my to do list never seemed to shrink… oh well, at least my link list grew!

• I am making these for dessert tonight: mini caramel apples!!
• Wild Olive has a second set of drop-dead adorable mini bookmarks available for download.
  • Enter to win the most adorable cupcake charm I have ever seen on Bakerella.com.
  • If you have a DSLR camera, there is a really basic, but helpful tutorial on camera operations on KevinandAmanda.com.
  • What a huge art/craft project: a knitted mile!
  • I think these are funny: Dinosaur Comics.
  • I think these are cute: HiFiber Needle Felting Kits.
  • I think this is awesome: Will.I.Am on Sesame Street.
  • Is anyone going to the Maker Faire: New York this weekend? I plan to check it out on Sunday… see you there?</ul> TGIF! Have a good one!

All of the kids are heading back to school and that makes me think of new school supplies! Here are some of the school-related items I found on Etsy:

What do you think of when it is “back-to-school” time?

This week, I am featuring two versions of a very unique swap idea, both hosted by pahasiga:

Fun “Mathbox” for math lovers

and

Fun “Mathbox” for math haters

The idea for these two swaps came when pahasiga kept misspelling the word “matchbox” and thought it must be a sign to create a math swap. Math is all around us! Why not incorporate it into our swaps?!

The swap directions are pretty simple: 1) take a box, and 2) decorate it and fill with fun math. But what exactly is fun math? Here is a description from the swap…

_“There are things that you maybe have never thought to have a connection to math. A round button with stripes on it? – it is a circle with chords dividing it into segments – very mathematical! Beads that are all round (spheres) or long ones (cylinders), inchies (squares) and ATCs (rectangles)… Unsharpened pencils are prisms or cylinders, and when they are sharpened, then they are prisms or cylinders with a cone on one end. And I won’t even start on ribbons – I swear I have read about a way of building up all geometry from ribbons.</p>

Also, there are any kind of math-related jokes; funny, fake or just interesting math problems; math puzzles – logic problems, sudokus of all kinds, KenKen, Slither link, nonograms, light up, Hashiwokakero (bridges), Shikaku (rectangles), Nurikabe (Islands in the Stream), Dominosa, mazes, Kakuro, fill-in-crosswords, etc etc etc.

You can cut problems out of magazines or books, copy/remake from them (giving credit where due), or even create the jokes/problems/puzzles yourself. Don’t stuff your box with only one kind of things – let there be at least four kinds of fun math in the box, and let there be at least one math of a puzzle type – not only buttons and beads.”</i>

In the Math Lovers swap you can include difficult math problems in your box. In the Math Haters swap, only send the easiest of puzzles. Both swaps have a sign up deadline of this Sunday, September 19th. You must have over a 4.9 rating, with at least three ratings for package swaps, to sign up. Show your math love and swap some math fun!

yippee! It is Friday! I have a packed weekend coming up, but it should be fun. What will you be doing this weekend? Make sure to leave some time to check out all these crafty links…

• The cupcake toppers swap hosted by thehappyhoneybee was so fun! I made the toppers you see above, and you can check out more of the lovely finished toppers on thehappyhoneybee’s blog. Such a fun and fast craft!
• MarthaStewart.com has rounded up all of their Best Clip Art in one handy spot.
• Strange: 14 Cool and Innovative Scissors
• I just discovered this beautiful online shop: Olive Manna. It sells all sorts of packaging and craft supplies.
• And a newly discovered blog: Howd.i.y!
• I thought this ruffle messenger bag was too pretty not to share… and the tutorial comes in both French and English!</a>

Ok, ok… I know that Halloween is still ages away, but I already have some spooky links for you! Bwaaahaaahaaa!

• Gross Halloween Party Food
• Spooky Pancakes
• 3-D Skull Cake

Any awesome links I missed this week?

September has rolled around, the weather is a bit cooler, school has started… I couldn’t help myself – I felt compelled to search for “autumn” on Etsy today. These are some of my favorites of what came up:

If it is fall where you are, what are your favorite things about the season? Are you making any special crafts in honor of autumn?

I was so excited to discover that Swap-bot’s cards (and my glittery matchbox) were included in an article on the Overnight Prints blog about the “Best Business Cards.” I love designing Swap-bot merchandise and business collateral, and this just gets me more motivated to create some new items! Thanks, Overnight Prints!

I’ve got two weeks worth of awesome links for you today… there is a wide variety, so enjoy!

• These star cupcakes (seen above) from inchmark are so sweet and clever. They were made for a space-themed birthday party, but I think they would be a big hit at a Labor Day party, too! (Labor Day is a US holiday happening this weekend, for all of our international friends.)
• Speaking of cupcakes, I am intrigued by these five different potato chip cupcakes on Cupcakes Take the Cake.
• Another Labor Day worthy treat: adorable “poptarts”-on-a-stick recipe from The Family Kitchen.
  • For all ATC creators: The Richmond Art Gallery is currently requesting entries for their huge upcoming 5th Annual Artist Trading Card Exhibition. Anyone can submit 9 ATCs which will be exhibited in the show, and then you will also receive 9 ATCs from other exhibited artists after the show is over. Read the official info page for more details. What a great opportunity to have your artwork shown in a real gallery!
  • IndieSmiles.com is celebrating its one-year birthday this month by holding a donation drive and photo contest to support the ASPCA (the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). Everyone who donates $5 to the cause is eligible to enter the photo contests with a chance to win big prizes.
  • This is so cool!! Sketch Swap – It is a web application that let’s you immediately swap a digital drawing with another random sketcher from anywhere in the world. It is an anonymous process and you never know what kind of drawing you’ll get in return! Plus, you get to see your swap partner’s drawing unfold just as they drew it. Fascinating.
  • Wow! Check out this amazing art made entirely from envelopes.
  • I think this Doodle Diary reviewed on CraftyPod looks adorable and so fun. …and she is giving away a copy! Comment on the blog post to enter.
  • If you like crafting flowers, this round-up of over three dozen flower tutorials on Oopsey Daisy is an amazing resource!
  • I love this sweet strawberry pillow tutorial on the purl bee.
  • Remember those cute bacon bookmarks I linked to on August 20th? Well, you can now get bacon fabric created by the designer Mollie Johanson, of Wild Olive! She doesn’t even eat bacon, but she sure makes it look adorable!
  • So wild – geeky nail art.
  • Check out this wonderful craft blog, Naughty’s Hidden Stash, written by our own, NaughtyElf. It has some fabulous ATC and altered art inspiration!
  • Four more new, cute blogs I discovered recently: Wolf and Willow, oh, hello, friend, Make Do & Send, heartmade.
  • These two awesome reviews of Swap-bot made my day: 6 Reasons I Love Swap-bot by Swap-bot user, fuzzington, and If you craft, you should swap by Swap-bot user, CraftySmurfette. Thanks for the awesome write-ups!</ul> I am so excited for the long weekend, but I have already packed it full of activities! What will you be doing this weekend?</ul>

We are in the big leagues! Well, not exactly… 300,000 is a very large number, but it is still fun to see how Swap-bot compares to the most popular websites in the world. NMAP.org created a cool interactive visualization using the favicons (the tiny icons seen in your web browser’s address bar) of the top 300,000 sites (with favicons) based on Alexa traffic data. The size of the icon in the visualization is proportional to each site’s level of traffic.

You can search for Swap-bot.com and find our icon in the lower right corner. It is tiny, but I am pumped that it is not the tiniest! Yay! I think it is awesome that we even made it into a group of top websites… even if it is an extremely large group! ha!

The hand carved stamp seen above was made by Swap-bot member, Missthundercat. Isn’t it cute?! It is hard to find a hand carved stamp that isn’t cute or interesting in its own way, and there are many for sale on Etsy. Here are some of my favorites…

Have you ever carved your own stamps? I have made a couple, but I want to get back into it… perhaps I should join the Hand Carved Stamps Swap-bot group.