Making Cards for Troops, Family, and Friends

I have this funny relationship with cardmaking. I enjoy making greeting cards, and especially love the ones I make for troops to send back home to their families, because I hope I'm helping, in some small way, to ease their deployment. But as soon as I send homemade cards off to friends and family, I have this fear that they'll think, "Geez, couldn't she have sprung for the bucks to send a Hallmark?"

Several people have asked to see some of the greeting cards I've made, but I'm usually in such a hurry to get them in the mail, I forget. But here's one I made Sunday for my newly discovered "half mom." (For those visiting the blog for the first time, or who might have missed it, I wrote a few weeks ago about my search and discovery of my long-lost sister and her family.) It's difficult when you don't know someone's taste, but the paper she used for her lovely "welcome to the family" note, along with the lining of the envelope, gave me a clue. It had lovely pink flowers that looked a bit like dogwoods, so I decided to go with those as an inspiration point.

I found some with pink rhinestone centers in my flower stock, but they're very delicate and needed some sort of frame to stand out. Since it's spring, I decided to go with accent colors of green and lavender, along with a soft pink checked paper (edged with a slightly darker pink ink) to match the flowers. These colors also let me use my green flower brads along with purple round ones and some pretty ribbons from my ribbon stash. Because I wanted to write inside the card, I used white cardstock, but covered it with a textured spring grass green.

For some reason, even with a great grid cutter, I could not cut a straight rectangle to save my life for that purple cardstock behind the green flower base, so I finally solved that problem by deckling the edge. Then I put it onto the cardbase with adhesive backed foam, so it stands up a bit from the card. Finally, I lined the envelope with the same pink paper I used on the card. Also, I don't know how it looks on your screen, but that bit of green behind the flower is not nearly as neon as it turned out in my scan!

This one I made for a writer friend, Kate Douglas, last summer. (Again, the color's a little off. The top part is actually a pale speckled blue.) Unfortunately, this weekend I found it mixed into boxes of cards for troops, so obviously I forgot to send it. I'd put a cover of her latest Wolf Tale book in the beach bag with the towel, sunscreen, and flip flops, but now, since I'm so late, I'm going to update it to show Demon Fire, the first in her demonslayer series. But don't tell her!



This is one of the blank inside cards I made for the troops. When you're sending overseas, bulky embellishments just don't work as well, because military mail can get really beat up. So, I like the printable e-cards I've found at Scrapbook.com because they're made to look dimensional, when they're actually not. In this one, what looks like a ribbon top border is printed on. But the "Missing You" tag and the one beneath I cut out from a selection of other comments that come with the card. As you can see, I inked the edges of them to make them stand out a bit more. This is one of my personal favorites because a female soldier can send it home to her man, but it also works as a card for a woman.