Gift Cards

It's so nice to have access to the internet again! A day after the derecho storm that hit our area, our landline and internet went down for a week. However, we were still so much luckier than so many people and never lost power and didn't have any damage to our house or neighborhood, thank God!

Even before the storm, I had been having some issues with the touchpad on my laptop freezing up and essentially making my computer unusable. I finally broke down and got myself an external mouse. That seems to have solved my computer usability issues so I thought it's high time for another post!

First off, I wanted to say thank you to the folks at the wonderful Heart 2 Heart Challenge Blog. One of my cards was picked to be in their June Top Ten! Yay! Click here to see the post with that card.

Secondly, I also wanted to say thank you to all you sweet bloggers who have been commenting on my cards/posts. I read every comment and appreciate all of them! I'm hoping I'll be able to reciprocate more, at least for the summer months when my schedule isn't as crazy as it is during the school year.

I have been spending a whole lot of time cleaning out my basement and crafting area. More needs to be done but I am actually able to find things again and have space to put things back. I intend to clean up even more and take pictures of how things are set up down there at some point but for now, I am loving having room to create.

Since I've been cleaning and going through my things, I've come across tons of retired paper, of course. You all know I'm a paper hoarder, right? Although I am going through my retired papers and using up what I can on my scrapbook pages and standard cards, I still hate to get rid of the smaller scraps so one of my projects has been to create sets of 3" x 3" gift cards.

I start off by taking a 3" x 6" neutral piece of cardstock and folding it in half (with one of my multitude of bone folders which are now neatly organized on my desk!) to form my base. You could also use your handy dandy Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge to make some card bases. Then I start to play! With some cards, I simply use a 2 3/4" x 2 3/4" square of patterned paper on top and I sometimes add a little bit of embellishment. Some of the paper is so pretty though, that there is no need. I inked up the edges of this paper for a bit of contrast. These were very quick and simple to make. Have you ever been in a rush to get out the door on your way to a birthday party when you realized you didn't have a card? Make up a bunch of these to have on hand and your problem is solved! Or how about using one of these once in awhile to drop a note in your child's lunchbox?

With some of the cards, I added a bit more stamping and patterning with the scraps of left over scrapbooking paper. I also used a decorative scissors to add a deckled edge on one of the following cards.

For my last grouping, I used my Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge to cut out a number of shapes from scraps and I added decorative borders with some Martha Stewart punches. Wouldn't a set of these in a small box be a sweet little gift?

The stamp set Enjoy! is a really great one to use for this type of project.

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