Card Starts

Are you a card maker with lots of friends and family that EXPECT hand crafted cards from you?  I try to only send store-bought cards to those who don't appreciate the loving thought that goes into the hand-crafted variety.  This means that some people can almost feel insulted if they don't get a hand-crafted card from me!  Of course, life doesn't always cooperate by giving me plenty of time for card making when cards are needed.  So, I'm learning to make "generic" cards ahead and have them on hand to finish as needed.  This is especially easy to do when I'm already doing some crafting and have pulled together a variety of papers that go together pretty well.  By using those scraps I can usually put together several "card starts" quickly.

By also having a bunch of pre-cut adhesive-backed greetings in different colors (see this post) and sometimes even having some pre-printed sentiments for the inside of the card (see here) I can fairly quickly put a nice card together when needed.

This card is an example.  As you can see, the card is basically put together, but there is no sentiment and the decoration is pretty generic.  My father had a birthday in early March and I needed a card, but had been sick and not had much time for creative endeavors.  It was wonderful to find this card start.  I adapted a poem I found for the inside of the card, printed it and cut it out for the inside.  An adhesive-backed birthday sentiment added to the front of the card gave me a nice card quickly.  (Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of the finished product, so I guess you'll have to take my word for it that it worked!)