Gratitude

We’re a little behind on finishing our thank-you notes for Christmas, but I’m determined to finish them this weekend. Here are a few cards and envelopes I made using my Silhouette machine. I love how easy it was to cut the envelopes out of pretty magazine pages!

I tried a few different methods for making the cards. This is probably my favorite: I cut the words “Thank you” out of the card, and then glued a piece of magazine page under it. The downside is, when you open the card, you see the other side of the magazine page, but I’m telling myself that’s part of the handmade charm, right? Rather than deal with gluing on the little loose shapes from the interior of the letter “A” and “O,” I turned the font into a stencil-like font by just using the “Slice” tool in the Silhouette software to cut a little notch in those letters.

I also experimented with cutting the letters out of magazine pages. I had some problems with the thin pages tearing while being cut. Then I switched to the new ratchet-style blade and that worked better, though some spots still were problems. While this method eliminates the unsightly stuff on the inside of the card, it always means gluing each letter individually. (I have a Xryon sticker maker, but these letters are so lightweight they are tricky to feed in). I forget where I read this tip, but I cut a rectangle around the words, so I could use the negative space as sort of a guide to place the letters.  And I then could use that negative space/shape on another card. (see the first card on the left in the top picture)