My first gift set

Tomorrow we have to say good-bye to our babysitter, Laurel, who has been with us for almost 3 years. She's spending the summer as a camp counselor and then heading off to college. We are really going to miss her, so I decided to make a little send-off gift set for her, with her college days especially in mind. For simplicity I used the same color scheme and a lot of the same supplies, and everything here is pretty quick and simple, but I hope still reflecting of how much she means to us.

Here is the thank-you card I made. The flowers from Live Your Dream were colored with turquoise and black markers, and I edged the petals with the side of the black marker. The dot paper is from Doodlebug and the dot ribbon is from Michael's. I stamped the sentiment from Short & Sweet in turquoise and used my oval punches - it's just attached to the ribbon with sticky strip.

The gifts are going into an altered Maya Road chipboard box. I covered the window on both sides; the outside uses the same stamping technique as the card, but with turquoise designer paper from SU and rounded corners. (So mad that I smudged the turquoise with the black marker on this one!) The sentiment (also from Live Your Dream) had to be cut into bits to make it fit the space.

Here is some of the little stuff I put inside. Two domino magnets (these were already made from craft fairs past), two matching pens, two Post-It pads, and a roll of quarters. The cover for the quarters is a Bazzill scrap stamped with an Anita's bubble stamp and embossed. I did this before I decided to make everything matchy matchy - hope it's close enough!

I purchased a gas card (not that it will go very far...) and made this quick little holder for it. Tutorial to come sometime in the near future...

Here's a set of 10 very simple monogrammed notes. Pretty Petals background, Lovely Letters monogram, with circle and scallop punches. The size is 3.5" x 4.75" - perfect for the leftover wedding thank-you note envelopes I have lying around! I'll add a book of stamps to go with these.

I made a quick badge holder album (tutorial is available on SCS here) to put a few photos of the kids in. (I also made one for myself and took it to Virginia with me.) I did minimal stamping for the sake of time - the front and back cover were done on the computer.

The journaling shape shown was stamped with the journaling image from Enjoy Every Moment. This was a really fun little project that I'll definitely be revisiting. Tip of the day: As people were looking at my album earlier this week, the ribbon knots constantly kept coming undone. For this one I tried two things: making the ribbon pieces longer and tying them in double knots. I need a bit more practice on making the double knots look as good as the singles, but hopefully this will hold together better.

Here's the back cover - I thought this scripture was perfect to send her out into the big wide adult world!

In other stamping news, before I left on Monday I sent off six cards for the Paper Crafts Stamping Royalty contest. They are supposed to call the winners by the 17th, so wish me luck... I'm sure it's a long shot, but I really wanted to enter and just see what happens!