Christmas-themed thank-you cards

It's been a while. These were thank-you cards I made for my mentors and buddies and a few other lawyers at the firm where I interned at. I enjoyed myself and learnt a lot, hence I felt the need to express my gratitude for their warm welcomes. As you can probably tell from the designs of the cards, it was around christmas time last year.

Key material for a simple and quick way to make nice-looking cards: fancy stock paper. These were all the materials I used for the cards: stock paper, foil chipboard alphabet stickers and a bit of brown paper (not pictured). For the stock paper it'd be good if you use ones which are patterned on both sides, so the inside of the card looks nice as well.

Cut half a piece of stock paper and fold it into half, free-hand cut a rectangle of brown paper and stick it on with glue, paste the alphabet stickers and voila! Nice-looking card is done. Great for when you need to make many at once. It's still handmade and heartfelt (:

I loved the funky christmas trees pattern. I'm all for cute (:

This was cute too, but it had a slightly vintage feel to it

Mistletoe (:

Stationery: pens & pencil tin

This idea was actually given by a friend who did it to her pens, and I think it's such a simple but brilliant idea. So much so that almost all my pens look like that now.

A really cheap and easy way to decorate your pens!

Basically you just grab a magazine (I use IKEA's, 'cause they always have such nice prints), flip through to find some nice patterns, and cut out rectangular pieces of them, roughly estimating the length and width need to wrap it around the ink stem. For the pens that I use (Pilot G-Tec, pictured), it has to be magazine paper in particular, 'cause only magazine paper is thin enough to be inserted.

Take out the ink stem from the pen, wrap the slip of magazine paper tightly around the ink stem, and carefully insert it back into the pen. And that's it, you have a cute new pen! Simple and environmentally-friendly isn't it? Because you're using magazines you've read. And also because the pens are so pretty, you'd rather buy refills than a new pen. You can even regularly change the design of your pen, simply by taking out the slip of paper!

And this is my newly decorated pencil tin:

I bought a plain black pencil tin when I was in Osaka. It came with silver alphabet stickers for me to decorate it with, but while shopping on another day, I came upon the stickers section in a departmental store, and I saw these alphabet stickers in colored crayon font, and I knew I had to use them for my new pencil tin. I even grabbed the hiragana (japanese alphabet) version of the stickers, which I have yet to use. It took a while to come up with the quote, given that there are only 5 of each alphabet, in particular the vowels. But this is what I came up with, and I am pretty pleased :D

Tea party: mustache party favors

These cute mustaches were also adapted from Paper + Craft by Minhee and Truman Cho! The idea was originally for drink toppers, but I decided to stick them to satay sticks instead and they made for interesting props for photos at the party (:

The templates for the mustaches can be found here

An assortment of shapes and sizes

Tea party: flowers

Also adapted from Paper + Craft by Minhee and Truman Cho, these flowers were adapted from a template meant for making flower clip-ons for shoes. The template can be found here.

I traced out the template onto tracing paper, and cut dozens of pieces out from stock paper. And stuck them practically everywhere...like on my guestbook (above).

And made flower chains with them.

Basically, after cutting out 4 different sizes of the template, use a pencil and curl the petals of the flowers by rolling the pencil into the paper. Then glue the 4 different pieces together and voila, a flower is formed! Simple craft. The cutting of the pieces can be pretty tedious though.

Tea party: paper flower balls

Easy-to-make tissue paper flower balls! Adapted from the book Paper + Craft by Minhee and Truman Cho

Materials: tissue paper, wire, thread, scissors
You can experiment with the type of paper used actually. In this case I mixed patterned paper with plain colored ones. You could try crepe paper as well.

For the bigger flower ball, stack 8 sheets of 21cm x 30.5cm tissue paper together and fold in 3cm accordion folds. Trim the edges (either pointy or rounded). Tie the center with wire. Loop thread with wire and leave it long enough to hang from the ceiling. Carefully separate each tissue layer, pulling each layer away from the center until they form ball-like shapes.

For the smaller flower balls, the tissue paper should be cut into rectangles 13cm x 15cm. The book says each ball requires 4 rectangles of tissue paper stacked together, but after experimenting I find the flower balls look prettier with 5 sheets, like the one above.

This one is made with 5 sheets of tissue paper too.

This one's made with 4 sheets.

Budget-friendly and pretty-looking decorations for a party (;