Stickerbag Zoo Game

I love sending fun little games and surprises with my letter. Sometimes I even event new games like this one: A Stickerbag Zoo.

I had a small sheet of cute little animal stickers so I made a game.
I put the stickers bag in the plastic wrap they came and but drew 'bars' in front of the animals with a permanent marker.

The rules state:
"This is a zoo with 18 animals. But some are double (eg. 2 lions). Help us up the variety by taking out one of the animals which are double and add a sticker with a new animal instead. Let's get as many kinds as possible.
No more doubles? Send home to *name and adress of reciever*"

I hope one of my pals will enjoy this game and have fun with sending it on to other penpallers.

Sent out in July

First letter for a new pal. Magda in Poland.

A pencil case - junk food - letter for Lori in Canada

My new pal Magda wrote me back super fast so I whipped up another letter for her here in July. The pouch on top with the text "everyone's a star and deserves the right to twinkle" doubled as the envelope.

Kitty mail for Carla Rose in the US.

Stitch letter for my pal Sany.

Recieved in July

Beautiful letter with lots of goodies from my new pal Magda in Poland.

Cute card from Heather in the US love the dinasaur stickers

Look at that great sticker-stripe with frog princes holding hearts, so cute!

Seed packets from IKEA

This week we went to IKEA to buy a couple of things. I found these amazing seed packets on sale (around 1 dollar for a pack of 3). Aren't they awesome? I love their graphic look and they are perfect for adding to a penpal letter - although we are late in the season but they should be good for use untill 2017. :-)

Kitty mail

I made this cat themed letter for my pal Carla Rose in the US. The  letter is written on cat themed letter paper. I found a big sheet of cat scrapbook paper in my  craft stash. I also included some cut-out cats, a cool tatoo-styled notecard and two playing cards with cats. I hope she'll love it.
All of this was less then 50grams so really cheap to send.

Our Project Planner

Living on a farm we always have ongoing projects and need to do a lot of organizing/tracking.

The planner is divided into four categories: House, Outside, The farm buildings and 'Everything else'.
A standard page includes a title: Eg. the name of a room in the house, and a list of to-do projects.
We try to divide the projects into smaller projects so they are easily obtainable. Every project has a progress bar. Every time we have worked with a project we can color in as far as we think we have progressed. When a project is finished we cross it of to the left.

On this page a few projects have become invalid so we've just crossed them over.

Some of the pages are more journal styled - like this one that contains info about my first litter of bunnies this year - from day of breeding to observations and count when born.

Bigger projects have several pages with todo lists, shopping lists and info about colors we've used.
If I can't find another color swatch I just take out this one and add it to next years journal.

This is an example of another fun page - I track our egg supply by simply adding to this list daily. Instead of just writing a number I paint little eggs. Once a week I add them up and write the number to the right.

I also keep track of how much of the different fruit and vegetables we harvest. This way I can compare to last year and see if we did better or worse.

... And I draw little plans of how I want my gardens planted... This is great to do in the winter months.

Lastly I want to show another type of to do lists. This is a prioritized list of 19 projects we want to finish this summer. The A, B and C's show how big we think they are - C's require a lot of work.

Do you use a project planner?

My personal planner - introduction

I share a lot of mailrelated stuff on here. Another thing I really love is planning. I have a personal planner and our household has a project planner. In this post I'll show you some pages from my personal planner.

I bought my personal planner on paperchase - I love the design with the birds and the dark lilac combined with brighter pink on the inside. I also like that it's soft to hold and has a great closing clasp that holds it tightly together even when stuffed with items. In the inside cover I keep stickers and little notes to write on. The contents vary all the time.

One of my penpals sent me this lovely bookmark with a lady in a 'tea flower'. I use it as a bookmark in my calendar so I know which week we are in.
The basic idea of the layout:
Weight tracker: Right now I am trying to loose weight. The pink dot on the left page at the top shows my current weight - I way myself once a week.
Green: I usually use the green to write about tasks I have to do concering our animals
Orange: Is for tasks concerning cleaning.
Pink: The pink is used for statements or tasks that doesn' fint in any other category.
Blue: The food we had for dinner.
Other colors doesn't really have certain meanings - I just use them for decorative purposes and sometimes I don't really follow my own rules :-p
On this page I've added some long strips of tape to indicate our vacation.

Here are some other pages from this planner:

Do you use a planner?

Junk Food Ketchup Letter

A month ago I found an amazing pencil case in one of my go to stores. Yesterday the pencil case was turned into an envelope in a 'junk food' and 'back to school' combined letter for one of my best pals. Lori in Canada:

I rolled up the letter to fit in the pencilcase and added two cool erasers: A burger and a hotdog. I also added two coca cola bottles to add to a keychain or zipper on a school bag.

Snails on speed?

Okay I know it might be a long shot to indicate that this post has anything to do with what I normally post on Write Pretty but I got the association -SNAIL mail - so I think it qualifies it a bit - Right?

In my neighbouring country - Sweden - is an amazing artist Stefan Siverud. With a steady hand and a creative mind he decorates the shells on garden snails. I know it sounds weird but the results are amazing just look at the details:

Check out more snails and other great nature art on Stefans site: legalassassin.com

New stuff for the craft stash July

Once a month I raid my two favourite stores for new stuff to add to my 'Craft stash'. This month there wasn't that much but I bought a few items:

I broke our printer a few days ago so I bought some label-stickers where I can handwrite my labels untill we get a new printer.
I also bought a few notecards, some forest friend - erasers, a pad of new decopapers, a pair of fun socks, nailart stickers, and some small sticky notes.