The Joy of Homemade Gifts and Cards
As the pandemic surges and we are faced with extended hours of isolation from friends and kinsfolk, where holiday travel is limited, and a general mood of stress is heightened, we swear happening other forms of communication to express love and care.
Vacation card game and homemade gifts can take on a new meaning as we strive beyond the walls of our houses this winter season.
The Value of Homemade Gifts
Scheming homemade card game and gifts has forever been a source of yeasty expression for me. I recently found a card that said, "Contented Birthday, Daddy, May 31, 1969," the year I graduated from high educate.
The card, pen, and ink drawing occupied in by watercolor paints featured my father, a Jewish cantor, with me stagnant at a lower place, holding the hands of children from the grade where I served as a teacher's help. Information technology meant a lot to me that atomic number 2 saved information technology.
I also found a hand drawn birth announcement with a toucan rather than a stork flying countertenor carrying a newborn in honor of my girl's birth in Managua in 1983. I drew each announcement on an individual basi.
When it came sentence for her Bath mitzvah, 13 eld later o, I Drew the invitation and zeroxed it, coloring in each individual card with markers.
During my years as a head teacher, I prided myself in photocopying the designs and individually coloring the cards, adding a personal message to each of my school's 150 employees. Peerless special education aide told me that all year He recorded my card to the mirror in his bedroom to keep his spirits up.
Full of Creative Vibes
Card-qualification is a wonderful creative outlet. It's practical because information technology doesn't require a visualize studio surgery complicated materials. I've accrued a stockpile of blank cards and have congregate a set of pens, markers and paints, easily stored in a box up the closet. Card-making is relaxing and can personify through with euphony, listening to books on tape, and even spell watching Boob tube.
Per annum for the holidays, I try to shuffle a new kind of card. A couple of years ago, my creative person friend Kathe introduced me to Zentangle, a wonderful art form where you create patterns and designs, correspondent but more more intentional than doodling.
It is free flowing and does not require symmetry. Zentangles prat be meditative, therefore the diagnose drawn from the word "window pane." Many of my cards have zentangle variations.
Various New Ideas
Another year, Kathe upped the ante and talented me with materials needed to make adorned cards. The tools for embossing, addressable online and in craft stores, admit: multi-bicolor embossing powders; embossing pens; and a heating gun – all fitting into a shoe box. I save embossing for extraordinary occasions because it is a little messier than my usual card making.
While I was receiving chemotherapy, my energy was bring dow, but I insisted on sending cards. That twelvemonth, I purchased a varied collection of colorful stickers, flowers, birds, and other animals. My imaginative outlet was placing them on the cards. I still had fun.
Last year I tried tierce-dimensional card game. I went to an art memory boar and purchased tiny small foam pieces with adhesive that allowed me to do cut-outs and raised images. I had to buy larger envelopes and take the card game to the post office for extra stamps because the bulkier envelopes do not go through their regular machines, only it was worth it.
This year I revealed gel pens. I purchased a set of 140 colors which admit some with sparkles, just about in neon colors, and plain ones. I also have a special put of gold, silver, and bronze gel pens. My accustomed lacy notice stock was unavailable, but I plant the shinier cardstock works very easily with the sharp clarity of the gel pens.
Collages and Decorated Birdhouses
Here are a couple more ideas for specialized card game or single home-cured gifts: collages and decorated birdhouses.
Collages
This yr, as I am a new grandmother, I will be making and framing a collage of pictures of Anteo's first year.
I've ready-made collages many times before: for a BFF, a tribute to decades of friendship; my children a collage with highlights of our family as they grew up; and for my husband, a collage of sepia photos from his grandparents and some of the few pictures from his puerility in Nicaragua.
My process is simple. I gather together photos, read them and print 4" by 6'' copies. Then I cutting out the different images, arrange and glue them connected an 8.5" by 11" mainsheet of typing paper, outlining the images with a gold playpen and scan the montage.
Finally, I print the scanned edition on an 8.5" past 11" weather sheet. The collages can be made into a large card, and it is easy to make multiple copies of the scan to give to several people. And the collages can follow framed.
Birdhouses
For a three-dimensional visiting card that is more equivalent a special gift, I decorate birdhouses. I buy unpainted balsa wood birdhouses, decorate them with acrylic paint, and spray them with several coats of varnish.
I have given out numerous birdhouses over the days, just I'd never observed or heard about any feathered occupants. That changed this year when two different friends witnessed the birdhouse being used as a national and one equal captured a photo of a mother attending to her spoil birds.
During the epidemic, it is specially important to maintain and nurture connections with friends and family. If you have never sent cards, this may be the time to starting time. Card-qualification is a wonderful creative outlet, and you power glucinium cheerily surprised to hear from a protagonist who decides to frame one!
Do you use the time before the holidays to make stunning cards and separate things to send out to loved ones? What coiffure you write along them? Please share some of your innovative ideas. We would all benefit from new techniques.
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