Fun and personal cards

Here is the very first swing I ever took at graphic designing (don't worry...I promise I've gotten better)!  The nice thing about personalizing a card, though?  Unless your sister is a graphic designer herself, you really don't have to be skilled at all to make it a special gift.

You do, however, need a ripe amount of patience.  One October day in Vermont (probably, oh... 0.5 days before my sister's birthday), I spent almost two hours on my hands and knees rearranging and photographing bright fall leaves.  If you've never lived in Vermont, it's worth going some fall, just to get the brightest, prettiest leaves this side of anywhere.  If you have lived in Vermont, you can imagine just how long this took, given how windy the place is in October.

It's worth it, though!  If you photograph an entire alphabet, you've got a working set of letters you can use to spell out anything you want from then on!  I recommend compiling a few sets of these, overtime.  I have a fall set, a pebble set, a "funky" set spelled out with summer boat toys, and I'm hoping to put together a driftwood set next time I encounter some driftwood.  You can make an elegant theme or mix and match to create all sorts of different tones.

Here are a couple more examples:

 

With this last one, I collected most of these silly animal photos from the internet instead of using ones of my own (I haven't been this successful at catching animals in the middle of belting their hearts out).  These are fine to use for your own personal projects and for fun, but remember that they're probably copyrighted, so they cannot be used to make a profit!