Arts-N-Crafts: Birthday Card Project

I recently signed the little miss  up for this birthday card group exchange with 3 other kids. I posted the background story here.

Having recently reacquainted myself with the wonderful FUN world of art and crafts (read: handmade everything), I thought I'd raise the bar a notch higher make handmade cards instead. Ambisyosa. Yes, that's me. This little miss's mommy.

I also wanted the kid to remember this card exchange and I thought doing the cards ourselves would definitely leave a dent on her memory. (Well, we won't know till next year if my experiment turned out to be a success. Of course that's discounting the fact that she still doesn't have a full grasp of dates nor of time yet. Funny mommy, yes again that's me)

So anyways, I thought it was going to be easy peasy. But just as we were about to start the project, I realized I don't know where or how to start. I don't even know how I'd want the cards to look like nor what materials I should use. Thank God there are super women like (who else) Martha Stewart! So yes, I got the inspirations from her (not ashamed to admit just this once).

So I zeroed in on affordable (read: cheap) materials and majority of which I hope is already in my crafts box. I just bought a pack of kraft folders and colored pens. And yes, I am proud to say, that the rest of the materials  we already have on hand.

The materials we used for this project are as follows:

- short kraft folders (bought a pack of 10 for P35, if i remember correctly)
- transparent alphabet stickers (P49/pack)
- craft envelopes (on sale at national bookstore, pack of 10 for P8.50)
- leftover felt cloth from my holiday project last year
- beads also a left over from my holiday project
- colored yarns and threads
- craft scissors
- crayons
- construction paper
- ribbons also a left over from my holiday project
- permanent marker

Here's how the cards looked like before we personalized them:

let it be on record that we worked on these for 2 weekends.
and had to do several trial and errors before we finally got them right.

The little miss also made her own version of the birthday cards and we're sending them along with these. All 3 kids get their own personal cards from Maia. I just hope they will be able to pick up the message from those cards. Here's a sample of her card masterpiece (and we're really proud of this. we would want to keep  and frame them but well, she made it for the other kids so it's really not ours to keep):

I initially wanted to do the card messages using watercolor but it might take me one more week to finish so I went with the ever reliable permanent market instead. Kid was proud of what we did. And I hope A, M and J will love them too!