Birthday project 2012

What?
A gardening book for Summer. Each participant can create pages about a plant or a vegetable that is common for his country, state or region, followed by a birthday message for her.

How?
CloudyShadows kindly provided templates for the text page (description about the plant or vegetable) and the image page (images of the plant or vegetable). The green templates are for the vegetable version and the pink one for a plant.

Vegetable version:
Image Template [.Doc]
Text Template [.Doc]

Floral version:
Image Template [.Doc]
Text Template [.Doc]

Already submitted:

Cherry Sour

Water Lilly

White Trillium

hungarian colchicum

I like the idea of something related to gardening. If it could be as personal and as useful as last year's preset (which was a great idea) so much the better. Perhaps we could get her a set of hand tools like a pair of Felco pruners and other tools. In Europe, they make some of the nicest tools. I will gladly help to cover any costs.

I think she is an old movie geek and a classic book geek too. I would be happy to contribute to getting her a tablet that we could load up with books and movies that mean something to all of us. She has an iPhone so perhaps she has an iTunes account. Or perhaps not quite so extravagant as that, perhaps we could buy her an iPad, and send her a compiled list of books and movies that we all like and figure out some way to group the entries. We could also throw in some iTunes gift certificates to cover the costs.

If we go the book route again, I am looking forward to helping in any way that I can. I am a writer and an editor for what it is worth.

I definitely don't want to give her something techy. I think it should be something creative and not just a selection of things we like. Its not easy to find something regarding gardening but i hope we will find something.

Good point - anyone can buy an iPad or other tablet. The great thing about the cookbook is that it is useful, very personal, and it certainly was something she is interested in. Would something like a travel guide be appropriate? People could find their favourite destinations in their home countries and write about them, include photographs perhaps? It would be a personal travel guide for Summer provided by her fans.

I still like the idea of gardening though as it is one my interests too. What about a collection of gardens around the world illustrated with photographs? Maybe we could get action figures of Summer in various roles and pose them in various places...or maybe not.

Perhaps a garden journal would work. It could sort of a diary with a collection of stuff related to gardens that would be organized like a calendar perhaps. It could also be personalized to reflect her career and her interests. She could use it throughout the year to plan the garden, seed, tend to the plants, harvest, and prepare the ground for the following year. I know that shipping plants would be difficult but perhaps the guide could include recommended plants?

The idea of a sort of garden journal sounds nice. ...But please without action figures of her.

I agree that going tech isn't the best idea. Summer mentioned before that the irony of her playing Orwell is she's not the most tech-savvy person. She also admitted at NYCC that she's still using the iPhone 3. I get the impression that she has simple tastes, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm the same way.

I'm also not a fan of action figures. I can see the humour in it, but there's another site that's obsessed with making action figures of her, and I'd rather S-G.net not associate with that site in any way.

Gardening isn't a bad idea, though I don't know the first thing about it.

Hmmm...this is a difficult one, but I'll just make a suggestion. Perhaps we could create a photo album of various pictures from the places where we all come from (ex. a famous landmark or a city street). The photos, of course, must be taken by us and not copied from Google or anything like that. If anyone wants to, they can put in a greeting with their photo in a simular fashion to that of a post card.

OK so whatever we do, no action figures...

So after just a little bit of brainstorming:

A gardening guide, perhaps with some sort of schedule - a work book that she could use to organize, plan, and carry out the tasks.

A travel guide that includes pictures and write ups with recommendations of what to see and do in our respective cities. It could perhaps be organized as the tour each of us would give Summer if she wanted to see our particular city or town. She could use it to explore a place on her own.

Any other ideas?

I was waiting for this to start....................
I have a few questions as I have an out of the box idea.
I'll start with the easy and go from there.
Is this topic always discussed on an open board where all surprise can be lost?

For the cook book, we even announced it one the website and Summer was surprised.
I also think that sooner or later we will announced the idea for next years birthday also on the website. Its the best way to get a lot of people to take part in this.