New Trail Names & Sig Stamps

A few months ago Daddy's Favorite Princess asked me to carve her a new trail stamp.  Her original stamp was a Hello Kitty face.  It was about the size of a quarter and she lost it.  Then I carved a Jewel Sparkles Lalaloopsy and she has been using it for a while.  But the stamp warped and it is hard for her to get a good image with it.

While we were at the Homerdoodle event she said that her trail name was too long, after a while she was just stamping table top box boxes, and not writing her name.  So we discussed the new stamp and she wanted a Shopkins image.  I added her trail name to make it easier for her when stamping a lot boxes.

While we were out hiking the trails at Homerdoodle, R2-D2 said that he would like to change his trail name.  He said if he could change it he would be more willing to go letterboxing.  Now, I don't believe that for a second but agreed to change his name and carve him a new stamp.

He said that he wanted to be Boxing Turtle.  He loves turtles right now.  But we really went back and forth on the stamp image.  He drew something up with his finger on his iPad and said do this.  I got on my laptop and designed a stamp using clipart.  He didn't like it and said "just wing it."  I said, "Have we met?  I don't wing it!"  We have been boxing for 5 years, I have 150+ traditional plants, and I never hand draw them.  We finally found something we both could agree on and I added his name to it too.

Lego Clone Trooper didn't ask for a new stamp or trail name but he got one.  When he graduated from 8th grade a few months ago, he got a phone and started using social media.  His Facebook name is Bantha Rider and is a big Star Wars fan.  So I changed his trail name to Bantha Rider and carved him a new stamp.  I really like his and he does too.

Lil Ewok is only 4 and he is staying the same.  If I gave him the chance to change it now he would probably pick a ninja turtle.  We will stick with his current name & stamp for now.


PENNY UPDATE:  I have decided not to carve more pennies.  I am in the process of painting a labeling the boxes for the event.  I don't have anymore round Lock n Locks; if I carve more pennies, I have to order more boxes.  As of right now, I have just enough boxes for the stamps that are supposed to come.  I had one person drop and I have a feeling that 1-2 more people will be removed.  That adds a few more stamps to my list but the boxes will be ready when I finish the carves.  

Event Stamps & OCD

Event boxes ready for paint

My event is one month away!  I am excited and terrified at the same time.  Back in March I set up two trackers to collect stamps.  I am shocked at the response and the number of stamps coming in!  Big "THANKS!" to everyone who have sent stamps.  If everything comes in I should have 92 stamps :)

If things go as planned, there will be 4 tails of stamps.  All About Indiana will have 28, Famous Hoosiers will have 39, Life is Good in Indiana will have 18, I have 6 Pennies, and the event stamp.

Pennies

My event is at Lincoln State Park across the highway from the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial.  There are currently 4 letterboxes in the park.  Only one of those has a Lincoln theme and it is a store bought stamp in a geocache/letterbox hybrid.  I wanted to do have a series of Lincoln stamps.  I was looking at images and found these pennies.  I thought I could do the top 2 (Kentucky & Indiana) but the bottom 2 (Illinois & DC) were to hard for me.  I posted on the Stamp Exchange and aMAZEing adventure frog volunteered to help!!  Her carves are awesome.

I got to thinking, if I am going to have the back of 4 pennies I should have a front.  So I carved that too.  Then I carved what I thought was the back of the penny- the Lincoln Memorial.  But as I was looking online I discovered, the Lincoln Memorial is not the back of present day pennies.  They have a shield!   Now my OCD kicks in.  I need to carve the back of current pennies.  And if I am going to do that why not carve the Wheat penny too!?  I don't want to carve any more pennies but I think I have to.  I'll probably loose sleep over it if I don't :'(

Anyone out there what to take pity on a crazy woman and carve a penny?  I need it by 9/16 because I am going to plant on 9/17.

Back to School

I started this blog 4 years ago when my kids went back to school from summer vacation.  Now all the kids are in school in some way.  

Lego Clone Trooper is 14 and a freshman in high school.  This was his first year riding a school bus and using a combination lock.  He gets a little confused about where his classes are but I know he will get his schedule down soon.

R2-D2 (who will be changing his trail name soon) is 11 and in 6th grade.  He goes to a private school and has moved up to the middle school hall way.

Daddy's Favorite Princess will be 8 at the end of the month and she is in 2nd grade.  She was very excited to go back to school and see all of her girl friends.

Lil Ewok is 4 1/2 and he started prek today.   He will only be gone a few hours 3 days a week but we are both excited about it.

I've got a confession to make, I'm a little burned out on letterboxing :(  I think every year I'm a little disappointed about how few finders my boxes get.  I'm hosting my event next month and I am signed up for a few LTC swaps but once those are all done, I'm going to take a little break.  My noxer husband asked if I could walk away from it for a year.  I think that is unrealistic!  But some sort of time off will be coming.

Homerdoodle Event

Stamping on the trail

On Saturday, the kids and I went to the Homerdoodle Event in Homer, Ill.  We left at 6 am and arrived just after 9:30.  We only made one stop on the way up to go potty and grab breakfast.  I had my phone take us the "fastest route".  I think she was having problems because the roads kept getting smaller and at one point she told us to go east and then turn into a corn field.  I deiced that we would not be coming that way home.

We checked in, exchanged with the hostesses, and got our clue packet.  I think I grabbed two table top boxes and then we hit the trail.  We found a series of 19 stamps called, "Frogs are lucky! They eat what bugs them!"  All of the stamps (except for the last one) were bugs.  They were great carves and we found the stamp that I sent to the event too.

Kid Table

When we finished that trail it was time for the group photo and lunch.  After lunch Daddy's Favorite Princess wanted to stay in the a/c and stamp event/table top boxes.  We asked the hostesses if she could stay and they said yes.  They had a kid table set up with papers, markers, stamps, etc.  They also had bubbles, side walk chalk, and popsicles.

Trail Selfie 

After lunch the boys and I hit the trails again.  We did a nature series and found 22 boxes.  This was a nice shady trail and I found my 800th box during that series.  But the boys were getting grouchy and fighting over who would get the box, who would stamp first, who would put it back, etc.

Event/table top boxes

When we finished those I promised them we would stay at the shelter for a bit.  We got back and we only had 40 minutes to exchange, stamp table tops, event boxes, etc.  We stamped as many as we could and ended up staying a little late.  You know they want you to leave when they start taking your chairs away.  So we threw in the towel.

One of the hostesses had talked about a fancy playground area and I let the kids play there a while.  Lil Ewok ended up slipping on the rocks and getting a little wet.  After a while I talked the kids into getting 5 more boxes.  The stamps were wildlife in the park.

Playscape 

I would have liked to have gotten more boxes but the kids were hungry and tired so we left.  We went up the interstate and found a restaurant.  While we were there I studied the map and picked a different way home.  We got back just after 10:30 that night.  Homer is about 3.5 hours from home and my husband said that he didn't realize how far we were going.

We found 55 traditional boxes, 3 hitchhikers, 1 cootie, 64 event boxes, and a few exchanges.  I was hoping to get more traditional boxes and exchange with more people but I guess there is only so much you can do in a day.

Life is Good Again LTC

Life is Good Again: Bed & Breakfast

I am hosting a "Life is Good" LTC swap again.  I really like the simple, positive, encouraging messages from the LIG shirts and whatnot.

I like camping and I recently bought a new book of camping scrapbook paper.  I looked around the LIG camping images and picked this one.  I messed up the words on the first go so I just cut them off and carved it again.  I really like the scrapbook paper but didn't want to hide it so I stamped my stamp on vellum and attached it to the paper with a mini glue dot.

I am hosting an event in September and I thought it would be cool to have a trail of these stamps at the event.  I have asked the LTC participants to donate their stamps and I have a few coming in.  If you have a LIG stamp that you are not using, I'd be happy to take it off your hands :)

For my Indiana themed event, I think I am going to call this series of stamps "Life is Good in Indiana."  

Heart Art LTC

This is my card for Beetle's "Heart Art" LTC swap.  My card is called "Mechanical Heart" and I stole this card idea entirely from LROSEM's blog post called Comet Months.  I will go ahead and walk you thru it.

LROSEM said she starts with Watercolor paper.  I am out so I used Bristol; it is thick like Watercolor but smooth.  Take an old gift card and smear glue around and add pieces of paper.  Now, I have never used a plastic card like this and I kept spreading it to thin.  It dried super fast and you can see on the edges of some of my cards that the text pages are not attached everywhere.

You smear the glue under and over the text pages.  When the glue is dry you apply Gesso with the plastic card too.  Again, I think I should have used more Gesso simply because the next few steps didn't turn out as well as I hoped.

For the next part, I took an old sock and a Spun Sugar Distressed Ink pad.  I started off tapping the sock on the pad and rubbing the sock on the paper.  But after a while, I stamped the ink pad directly on the paper and used the sock to rub the ink around.  I was hoping that the ink would be a little darker.  Maybe I should have tried a different color.

Heart Art: Mechanical Heart

Then, you cut the cards to size and stamp your stamp.  That part was easy ;)  Now for the fun part.  You paint Tim Holtz Distress Crackle Paint (I used clear) on the cards.   My cards didn't crackle as much as I would liked.  I think the problem there was that I didn't use enough Gesso.  The Crackle paint comes in 3 colors-black, while & clear.  I played around with the other colors a little bit on my scraps.  I will have to use them on a future project!

Then I edged the cards just like LROSEM.  I wasn't really happy with the cards but sent them off anyway.  I went away on vacation for 2 weeks and looking at my extra cards again I think they are not to bad.  The background looks pinker in person.

Vacation 2016

Arches NP

I just got back from a two week vacation out west, did you miss me?  Over a year ago my parents suggested that we all go on vacation together.  That would be my parents, me, my husband & 4 kids, my sister, her husband & 2 kids, and my other sister and husband.  It ending up being my parents, my family, and my 2 nieces.

We had a great two weeks out west.  We live in Indiana and went out thru the Rocky Mountains to southeast Utah.  We visited Arches & Canyonlands.  Then we packed up and went to southwest Utah.

Canyonlands NP

It just so happened that where we stopped for the night was having a hot air balloon festival.  And the people that my parents were camping next to said that we could go up in their balloon.  My dad and the 4 biggest kids took off to do that but the winds wouldn't cooperate and they didn't get to go up.  The kids still loved being so close to the balloons.

Balloon Festival

While in southwest Utah we went thru Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon National Parks.  They are very different and very beautiful.  We hiked a trail at Bryce and just road the shuttle at Zion.

My parents at Bryce Canyon NP

Then we went down thru Nevada.  We had planned on touring the Hoover Dam but had issues.  It's probably to long of a story to go into here.  So we had a picnic lunch there at the lake made by the dam.

Zion Canyon NP

After Nevada we moved on to California where we had more problems.  We got almost to the campground we planed on staying at and we were turned around because of forest fires.  It took a while but we eventually found a place to camp.  We went thru the southern area of the Sequoia National Forest where we walked the Trail of 100 Giants.  We decided that we came this far that we would continue to the northern area.  There we were able to drive thru the famous tunnel log.

Trail of 100 Giants

The next day, we spent a little over an hour at ghost town and then started heading back east to the Grand Canyon.  We walked the rim trail at the south rim, enjoyed some shopping, and ice cream.  The last activity on the way home was the petrified forest.  My kids were expecting the trees to be standing.  They all enjoyed the colorful logs.

We made two stops on Route 66.  One was the Midpoint Cafe where we had lunch.  The other was the Cadillac Ranch.  We didn't take spray paint for the Cadillac Ranch but there were cans all over the ground and my kids joined in the fun.

Grand Canyon

When my parents came up with this idea I said that I had to find a letterbox in each state and I was surprised that my husband went along with it.  I already had boxes in Ind, Ill, and Mo.  I was able to get boxes in KS, CO, UT, NV, CA, AZ, NM, TX, OK & AR.  I found 13 boxes and 2 hitchhikers.  Of all the boxes I looked for only 1 was missing.

Petrified Forest NP 

This was my husband and kids first trip out west.  We camped every night but one.  It was exhausting but beautiful!  Two weeks living in a van is rough.

Cadillac Ranch