I started off Monday with a bang and ended it with a fizzle! I went out beyond the confines of the house and immediate neighborhood for the first time since my surgery. RonChops and I went grocery shopping. Somehow I resisted these fantastic Martha Stew bird AND twig punchs - it may have been RonChops dragging me toward the food section and away from the crafts... I was in a weaked state... I could not resist the force (a man trying to get away from the craft isle is a mighty force when you are in a fragile state). When we got home I made split pea soup AND chili... and then it all pretty much went downhill from there. I had every intention of posting but I ran into a design snag and had to call it a night.
Monday evening (before the fizzle) I started working on Fall place cards. Everything was going great. I had them designed and printed and then started to cut them up and then ...ummm... write on them. Well that was pretty much the first and final snag. I had this terrific idea to use opaque gel pens to write on the dark background (I figured the text *had* to show up). Well it looked terrible and you could hardly see anything. I tried every color and then even tried regular markers (a dark regular marker is what I am showing in the pic.. it's ok but not the greatest - esp when you pair it with my terrible handwriting). It was not at all how I had seen it in my mind (don't you hate it when a good idea does not work out like you had envisioned)!
Bright and early Tuesday morning I started to work on them again and finally decided that the dark background would only work if you had either a) letter stickers or 2) better opaque pens than I had at my disposal. If you have never seen letter stickers you can find some good ones HERE and HERE and HERE. They are actually extremely cool and very easy to apply. You can also try rubons.. I think those might work pretty good as well. You can get stuff like that at your local craft store. If you decide that you like these darker cards then you might want to see if you can find some to use with these place cards.
So nextly I made the insides white instead of dark... so you could write on them. When I was working on this I was also in the process of getting together the winnings from the past few giveaways and needed a card big enough to write how sorry I was for taking so long to get everything mailed (the little tards were not going to cut it this time - I had a lot of apologizing to do!). So low and behold there sat a freshly printed batch of place cards... and zing... the LollyChops super energy efficient light bulb went off (it happens from time to time)! I could just use these little fellas as note cards! WOO HOO! I was super happy! I wrote my heartfelt apologies and packed everything up to ship!
All of the pics above are various states of getting things ready to make the cards into place cards. I put a little halfway mark on each set so you could tell where you needed to score and fold them (look for a dotted light blue line in the PDF template). I also recommend using a paper cutter to get the straightest line possible (when you cut them out).. oh yeah.. and of course I used my corner rounder. I used the small EK Success yellow one for these (see my post on corner rounders HERE).
I also scored them on the front left and right sides (just where the little marks are) and then flipped the paper over so I could score the entire width of the back instead (to me it makes for a little neater score).
Since I had a little room left over on the bottoms of the templates I went ahead and added some little tags you can cut out (from the trees that are in the cards).
Here is how I can see you using these tag/note card combos. Let's say you have a Etsy shop. You can use these little note cards to write a little note to the buyer of your fabulous handmade goodness and then you can also use the little matching tags to affix to the item sold. Don't cha love it!!
So that's all I gots today. You can get the darker Note Card/Place Card Template (PDF format) --> HERE <--
and the Note Card/Place Card Template with the white insides --> HERE <--
Hugs to one and all and again.. sincere thanks for your support and terrific comments and emails. I just really love you guys ya know!
