Thank you card therapy

Last week was rough. 

A day with an ill relative in the hospital. Grief. Exhaustion. COVID. Two atmospheric rivers. All the while being utterly behind on work because I can't focus. Things weren't great. 

But, when things are bad, gratitude is something that has been well demonstrated to reduce stress, improve well-being and social connections, and even improve physical health. Plus, when your life is chaos, the people who are in it to help smooth the road mean so much more. So, while stuck at home with COVID during a rainstorm, I decided to get crafty and make some thank you cards that felt like spring time. 

I don't like buying pre-made templates for my Silhouette when they're so easy to make, so instead I (totally legally, I'm sure) screen-shotted some images of tulips I found online and outlined them in Silhouette Studio. I had to cut the head of the flower off and close up each item so that I could cut the stems in a different color from the blooms. Once I had the heads separated, I freehanded some edits to a copy of each flower head to make the front set petals. I did this by creating deep crevices from random points across the original flower shape. 

Armed with my design, I pulled out some little scraps of scrapbooking paper that had made their way into the "not big enough to back a photo" pile in green and yellow and got to cutting. 

I started by using glue dots to attach the front petals to the main flowers. I used glue dots to create a little dimension, but mounting tape would perhaps have been even better. Then, I arranged the stems so that I liked how they sat on the card and attached each stem and flower head with a glue stick. 

I neatly hand-wrote a message across the top of some card and went over it a second time with black Sharpie. You could absolutely do this with your Silhouette Cameo, too, but I find the calibration process to be frustrating and the results to be just okay (you should have seen how long I spent on my wedding invitations...) Others I just left blank to customize a message inside. 

I really liked the way that one came out, but the second looked a little too empty after I tried to space out the flowers too much, so I repeated the process with some iris shapes to add an additional color (although I could not find a single scrap of anything purple at all among my scrapbook paper). Then, I made a few more tulips in a variety of colors, just because. 

After playing around with it a bit, I settled on 2 irises and 3-4 tulips as sort of the "sweet spot" for how many flowers filled up an arrangement. 

The result was a simple, cute set of cards that took my mind off of the sore throat and malaise for a bit.   

If you'd like to make your own, you can download the .studio3 file here.