You don't need to wait for a newbie swap - most of our swaps welcome newbies too and then we all jump on the newbie ones anyway
I think there is a resort swap coming up (not sure if it's open to newbies but it will say on the thread) and I am going to do one in March for restaurants (Eat around the world) which you are more than welcome to join. We are a supportive group of girls here.....so we'll help.
My first photo mat in a swap was about the size of an 8x10 instead of 4x6 and my tags would have held the 4x6 pictures instead and I had no idea what a slide mount was or why someone would ever need one in for slides in the year 2007 since pictures are mostly digital or at least film right? or make a border, puzzle piece, matchbox or other weird thing for the scrapbook. I just put tons of pictures onto one mat and put them on cute disney paper and called it a scrapbook. NOW, thanks to swapping and a very supportive group of ladies (who didn't openly make fun of my ridiculously huge first swap items), I can whip out a matted lyric, slide mount, tags in many shapes, even a paper piecing (imagine!) in a short amount of time and my pages (when I get around to actually scrapping) are fast to do and fabulous!
Whew - I'm tired now.....