Homemade Birthday Cards

If you are making Christmas presents, you better get started before December. Last year I made my sweet 91 year old grandma birthday cards. 50 to be exact! She sends birthday cards to all her children, spouses, grandchildren, spouses and great grandchildren. I should have added extras since 50 won't even make it through the year...

I think the cards turned out adorable, if I do say so myself. I used a bunch of printables from pinterest, and I won't even try to remember all the sites I printed them off. There were many repeating elements, but they are all at least slightly different the the last. Since they would be sent out to the same families, I didn't want to make 50 of the same card.

Grandpa Cards

I had to make Father's Day cards for my kids' three grandpas so this is what I came up with. I used a printable (from pinterest that I can't find again for the life of me) and printed them wallet sized sheets instead of 8 x 11.5. Then I sewed them on the card. I had to use big envelopes, because the card is an 8 x 11.5 fold just in half instead of quarters.

This is what I did for the wrapping on my husband's presents. 

The left one was candy the kids wanted to eat instead of give. The right was box cutter blades for his utility knife. 

Baby Girls

I know two girls that are about to have baby girls. So of course I made blankets and burp clothes. Then I made cards with the fabric scraps.

Anniversary Card

Long ago, back in December, I made my husband an anniversary card, and put mini snowflakes on it. It was fun to make paper snowflakes the size of half dollars.

While I was doing that, my daughter, drew a picture of her brother.  I love it, he is wearing glasses, then its his nose, then its a big pink mustache.  She knows he loves mustaches.

7th Birthday

My oldest turned seven. He doesn't really like cake, but he does love chocolate chip cookies. So this year I made a Chocolate Chip cookie icebox cake. It was seriously the easiest thing ever, as long as you planned ahead.

I also borrowed a stamp set from my friend and made him cute little birthday cake bunting for his cake. It was so fun, but also took about TWO hours! I need to get a mini stamp set, it was super fun, I stamped all sorts of things!

Back to the icebox cake, I made the cookies Wednesday, and practically burnt them on purpose, and then stuck them in the freezer until Friday. You want your cookies crisp, to say the least, because by the time you eat your cake, they will be as mushy as mush. I put a ¼ cup less flour in my dough, used butter instead of butter flavor shortening (since it has a lower melting point) and baked my cookies for an extra 5 minutes or so. See the difference.  The top one is what my cookies normally look like, the bottom one is for the cake, maybe I should have used less flour. 

Then on Friday night I made fresh whipped topping, from whipping cream, I made four cups because the whipping cream comes in cartons of two cups, but three would have been plenty for the LARGE cake I made. We fed 14 people this cake, and still had almost half a cake left over. Next time I make this, I think I would only make half a batch of cookies for my cake. Once my whipping cream was made, I covered a plate in one layer of cookies, then put a layer of whipped cream, a layer of cookies, a layer of whipped cream, and on so until it was as big as I wanted. Then let chill over night. Just for the record I was going to make this on a cake stand, it was his 7th birthday after all, but my husband told me to make it on a paper plate. I thought it was weird he cared so I listened, well turns out he thought we were making it for the party we went on Friday night.

So yummy, so much easier than frosting a cake. Next time I want to try with oatmeal cookies. I think it will taste like a Little Debbie Oatmeal creme pie, without all the store bought chemicals. You can also make mini cakes with this. 

For the past two years I've made my son cookie crème sandwiches, for his birthday in school, but to make sandwiches for enough kids you need two packages of cookie crème, and that is almost $6 for just the crème! So I think next year, I'm just going to make sandwiches with whipped cream, and refrigerate over night, I personally like whipped cream better than the cookie crème. Remember my son doesn't really like cake, and he thinks all those cupcakes everyone brings into school are exciting which I get. But at the same time, I don't want to bring in cupcakes for a child who doesn't really like them, normal chocolate chip cookies are too boring for such an event as a birthday, but apparently cookie sandwiches are not too boring.    

I also ate a fourth of the cake in left overs, none one else in my house wanted it, and it was too yummy to waste in my opinion.  (I did give a fourth of it away.) But I got a little sick of the chocolate chips, I'm wondering how it would taste if you either use none or less chips, and made chocolate whipped cream.  Or if you ground up the chips, and then used chocolate whipped cream.  It has so many possibilities. The chocolate chip icebox cake idea I orginally found in Martha, but I found this recipe the most helpful. Back to Martha I did not use mascarpone cheese or whiskey. Mascarpone is apparently expensive and it tastes similar to cream cheese, and my kid doesn't like cream cheese.  I blame that on my husband's genetics, I don't understand how any human being can not like cream cheese. 

Teacher Gifts

 The other day at staples I was looking for christmas cards to give to my son's teachers, but they were so expensive! Then I found red thank you cards and a light bulb went off in my head! I found these printables online and made my cards.  (Isn't the internet great, people so willing to share their talents.) I thought they were perfect because the whole reason you give teachers gifts is to say thank you. 

 I ended up making more cards to give to my sunbeam parents.  It was a hard half year for me which I think the parents knew, but I wanted the parents to know I appreciated teaching the kids, because it taught me so much about our Savior's love for us.
But back to the teachers, so my son has a kindergarten teacher who teaches two half day classes so she teaches 45 student every day, then she has a full time teaching assistant, who goes to church with us and all the kids absolutely love her. So in addition to the ornaments, I also made them ruffle scarfs. There are so many tutorials out there about how to do ruffles easily.  I tried so many and none worked, I went through so much thread on the first one. It took me about 2 hours, the second one took me 15 minutes.  So easy once I figure out the best way to ruffle on my machine.  I just wadded it up and tried sewing in a straight line. Yeah like the tutorial for ruffle scarf says, I should have listened instead of trying everyone else methods. I absolutely love the one on the left and wanted to keep it for myself.  I can't wait to make myself a ruffle scarf, they are so trendy. But who knows if the teachers like them.  Oh well not my problem.

Valentine's Cards

I had a lot of squares of material with hearts cut out of them from my heart garland, so I recycled some of them to make valentine's cards.  I sewed the material on to paper to make the cards.  We bought packaged valentine's for the preschool class, but sent these to grandma's and such.

Homemade Birthday Cards

I gave up making and giving birthday cards out for the most part. But I can't deny my grandparents or parents, just so happens that my father's birthday is five days after my maternal grandma's birthday, so I only had to come up with one design. But in a moment of ingeniousness I used thank you cards, and glued the pictures on top to hid the thanks, but that way I didn't have to fold or cut paper, just pictures. I also used a plastic label machine for the words. 

The cookies the kids are holding were free after finishing the summer reading program at the Library. Pretty awesome.

Wahoo, happy birthday. Grandpa and Great Grandma. Unfortuantely I apparently can't take in focus pictures. 

Mother's Day cards

These are the cards we made for grandma's for Mother's Day, it was last weeks family home evening. I made the photo corners so the grandmas could frame the picture if they so choose, or just keep it on the card. It was a PAIN! I thought the corners would be fairly easy, but after 16 corners, I wanted to cry. I took little squares and folded them diagonal twice, so they you get a triangle, and glue them together except for one of the pockets, then glued the back on to the card. When you opened it up inside there was a pocket holding more pictures. Plus a card that said Happy Mother's day, inside J signed his name, and I wrote his sister's.

A while back

A while back ago I sent out thank you notes for people who sent me birthday presents. I thought they looked really cute, so I'm posting it here. I didn't create this, I made it from my scrapbook software CD, unfortunately I'm not that talented, actually my problem is I don't have the right software to create things on my own.