What Will be Keeping Me Busy

This is what will be keeping me busy for the next two weeks...getting all these cards ready to mail to our supporters!

There is a group coming from our home church in Arkansas next week, so this will be a great chance for us to send mail.  The postal service isn't used very much here in Mexico, so we wait for these kinds of opportunity to send mail to the U.S.  We're also looking forward to having the group here, it's a group of high school seniors accompanied by some leaders and our missions pastor.  Miguel has been helping plan and coordinate their trip and will be hanging out with them while they are here.

I made all these cards last week, there are about 50 of them or so...I kind of lost count after a while and I secretly hope I will need to make some more because it was fun!  I felt a bit sad when I was done because I think I really enjoy making the cards more than I enjoy writing in them!  It's not that I don't like writing letters because I really do, especially imagining people receiving a little note from us, but I really do like making cards!

This is a fairly simple pattern.  I used white or colored card stock and chose either a patterned or solid colored paper for the front panel.  I stamped the front panel before pasting it (I really like to use a glue or tape runner) to the front of the card.  Some of the cards say 'Thanks Very Much' and 'Gracias', some say 'greetings from Mexico!'.  But this card would be cute as a birthday card or something else.

Side note:  I often use the clear stamps (also called cling stamps) because then I can use the alphabet sets to write all different kinds of things or write in Spanish.  There aren't many rubber stamps available in Spanish, so the alphabet sets have been really useful to me.  I have invested in several different alphabet sets in various sizes in both the clear and rubber stamps.  This also saves on storage since I don't have a lot of different stamps to keep track of.

On some of the papers, I took a napkin (a q-tip would have probably worked better, lol!) and rubbed some black ink around the edges of the panel. I really liked how it dressed up the card.

I stamped a matching flower pattern on different paper, again, either a solid color or print, and then I cut out the flower and used a double sided adhesive foam pad to make it stand out from the card.  As an added touch, I pasted a flower and stamped a little 'hola' on the inside.

Cutting out the flowers was by far the most time-consuming part of making this card, but it was worth it because I really love how it turned out.

So, now I really need to get to work on writing in them!