I wonder what swap has had the most participants... ever... in craftster history??.....Im sure someone who reads this will know...or at least know where to find out......

I hope so otherwise I might spend a few days going through the archives until I give up ...

The first Make-a-Friend swap was HUGE. There was like 150 people or something crazy! No idea if it was the largest swap ever though!

So my washing liquid went from the consistency of water to solid jelly like. is that right is that normal? What are other peoples like?

yep thats normal.
It's because solid bars of soap use NAOH or lye which makes the bar solid where as liquid soap uses KOH to make a liquid.
I think that the right way round.....

any how basics is that when you add a solid bar to water it will stay as a gel, no mater how much water more or less that you add, just more water makes a thinner gel with less bubbles. 

Same happened here; wanted to try my new home made liquid; but nothing came out of the bottle  A little hot water & shaking helps!

I just keep mine in a 2 gallon bucket with a lid, and I have an old 1/2 cup measuring cup in here to scoop with.  Much easier than trying to pour chunkiness from a bottle.  And, um, never try to put the soap in the blender to try and make it not so solid...blender+soap=very bad (though clean!) idea..... hahaha!

I can't wait to get started on this! I've been sitting at work making a list of possible items to make for this swap. It will be so fun to get my partner - I can hardly stand the wait!

This swap just might bring me out of hiding! It looks like a lot of fun and I'm getting tons of ideas since I've just read every post in this thread!

thank you all for the awesome ideas!

just to add a little p.s. - i recently found out that M&Ms Mars is conducting horrid animal tests.  i don't want to go into the details here because it's not easy reading if you know what i mean, but i encourage you to go to peta.org to check it out.  unfortunately they are the makers of many candies including skittles (mentioned in a post above), starburst, snickers, twix, m&ms, mars bars, milky ways and probably some others i can't think of at the moment (if you're concerned just be sure to check the back of the package to see who the manufacturer is).
sorry to be the bearer of bad news Sad but i hope that some of the above snacks are inspiring!

  I hadn't realised.
Thanks for letting us know, I sure as hell won't be buying their products again.

and yes, thanks for this!

I had waffles with fresh strawberries for breakfast.

Dinner is Eggplant Parmesan that just came out of the oven. yum.

I'm wondering if anyone can suggest some good snacks! I've finally made the conversion to being vegetarian (just a few weeks) and am having a hard time sometimes with starving in the middle of the day. I just keep grabbing carbs - peanut butter sandwiches, crackers, stuff like that. What do you guys keep stocked for when you need a snack NOW?

On a semi-unrelated note, how long does it take to not be tempted to relapse?

thank you!!

Those are so cute! I have the book Hello, Cupcake as well! I have been wanting to try the owl ones for a while!  Yours turned out so cute I may have to try it!  What a fun way to spend New Year's Eve!

I received my awesome package from goodtimegirl last week! I'm sorry it took me a few days to get the pictures up.

She hit my tastes right on and send me a lovely package!!

Here is a darling reversible apron (i love the coffee cup print - and there's coffee beans on the other side!), a cute little book to make gift in bags (going to be using for Christmas), some coffee, and then she made me the best hot choclate mixes, and coffee spice, as well as cider spices (you can see I have already been using it - yummy!):


here are my recipes, my mug (perfect!! it says shhh...I'm reading all over it), some super cute notecards, and some coasters:


and because her embroidery is so gorgeous, I have to show you, here is a close up of one of the coasters! and it's a fall theme - I adore anything autumn related!


thank you so much, goodtimegirl, this was a super fun swap!

gorgeous! as someone else said, they do look professional.