So, last week was Teacher Appreciation Week at my daughters school.  Of course she waited until late Wednesday night to say anything at all to me about it.  So I spent Thursday brainstorming and thinking of something that I could do quickly but would look nice and be used by the teacher.  I know that I for one don’t care to get (or give) a gift that is not something that i will use.  Of course the only exception is something that my little ones make me as a gift.

So I decided that I would use my Cricut and make some note cards for her teacher.  I really like note cards as a gift, especially premade ones that I can just grab and write in and send/give to the person.  It is nice to not have to hunt for some nice paper or try and find a store bought card that says exactly want you want it to say.

First, I sat down with my books from the Forever Young cart and the Wild Card cart and picked out the designs I wanted to make and wrote out all the layers that I wanted to cut and what colors that I wanted them to be.  I chose one of the purses from the Forever Young cartridge and decided on the embellishments. I used a 12×12″ peice of cardstock in a pretty charcoal gray color, loaded it into the machine, and set it to fit to page.  This made the machine cut the purse at 5 1/2″ in size.  Since I already had a list of everything and the colors laid out I was able to get through the cutting fairly quickly.  The most time consuming part at this point was removing the pieces from the mat.  That take some time.  Just a note, my cards and envelopes ended up getting resized part way through the cutting process and I am not sure how.  I think I accidentally bumped the dial at some point.  Plus I was trying to cut more than one designs layers at the time I had that color of paper in and I think that somehow messed things up as well.  But in the end it was ok, not perfect but giveable.

Here is my pile of all the pieces before assembling; doesn’t look like much.

Try and ignore my messy desk! It is my computer and craft desk and pretty much where I spend the majority of my time.  I didn’t take individual pictures of each card as I made them but here is a picture of all the pieces assembled.

I love the purse! It is super cute and I really didn’t want to give it away, but I did.  I had planned on 5 cards to put inside the purse to give but for some reason when i was done assembling I only had 4.  So I decided to through in the little butterfly card I made previously.  Also I am not sure what happened to it but I could not find the envelope to the blue “just a note” card in the bottom corner.  And I didn’t make another one becuase the card was too large on its own and the envelope would have never fit in the purse. So it got sent without an envelope. Sometimes you just need a card without the envelope, right? That what I kept telling myself.

The card in the upper left corner is actually the card for the teacher from Sarai.  It is a blue ribbon on the outside and then the inside (which shows through the middle) reads “#1 Teacher”.  I also forgot to cut the liner for the inside, so I just cut a small rectangle of white cardstock and adhered that inside.  Everything was put inside a small gift bag along with a small box of chocolates.

And so you know, she loved it! I got an email from her that day thanking me and telling me how much she loved them! So I was happy.  And it really only took me about 2 hours start to finish.  I made sure I watched Survivor first and then skipped the Mentalist and was able to catch the tale-end of Fringe. Not bad for a great little gift.

**My favorite cards are the scalloped gray one and the little green one. They were so cute.  And Sarai has already picked out what purse she wants for herself!