Emergency Gift Idea!

I like to make my own cards as gifts. But when I stumbled upon this amazing, awesome, gorgeous graphic from MWM Graphics, it was love at first site. So I decided to give these away as gifts for some people, instead of making homemade cards from scratch. Even though I don't celebrate Xmas myself, I know plenty of people who do!

So I got to work, printing these babies out on cardstock, cutting them to the same size, and wrapping them with yarn and other little charming paraphernalia. I actually made them folding cards by downloading the cards from the site, selecting one card (dragging the box/cursor over one of the card squares) and then pasting it to Microsoft Word and sizing it accordingly. Basically this way you can fit two cards per page. And I added a "Happy Holidays" line at the bottom, in all different colors. The postcard idea like they have on the webpage is good, but I was using only semi-heavy weight cardstock, and if I wrote on the back, the ink would be visible through to the front of the card. Can you tell I found this out the hard way?

As you can see, I just wrapped the cards up in little cute bundles, and off they went to their thankful recipients. I used some of the ideas I mentioned here, including beads on string and punching out snowflake shapes out of gold paper (which was really the inside of the envelopes from some fancy, generic Happy Holidays cards I received!):

I got a huge box of plain white envelopes two years ago for free on Craig's list, and used them here. To spice them up a bit, I glued on (with a glue dot or two) these cardboard/paper "button" pieces I had laying around the house, in all different colors. Here you only see the white and off white version on the backs of these particular cards, but they also came in brown, red, grey, black, etc.:

You have no idea how thankful people were for a gift they could use--and now! If you are too close to Xmas for your friends/family to use these, they can do so next year. Add a candy cane, and the present will be that much sweeter!

Sometimes simple really is best.

Honestly, if I was having a winter wedding...I would be seriously tempted to use these cards as my invites, seat assignment cards, or save the dates. You should see how colorful these look when printed. Brilliant design.