Geeky Thank You Card

By Vicky Nardone
My family has belonged to a local theater group since before I was born.  Every year at Christmas, some of the people in the group get together for a Christmas party.  One of the hi-lights of the party is a White Elephant gift exchange.  For anyone who doesn't know what that is, everyone anonymously brings a gift and then we draw numbers and go in order of our numbers for picking out gifts.  Everyone has the option to either "steal" a gift that has already been opened from someone else or pick a new gift from under the tree.  This year, my mom almost ended up with the picture to the left.

It's a "geeky" garden ornament.  She was going to give it to me and my husband to put in our vegetable garden next year.  Notice my cat Lily getting into mischief in the background.  She decided she wanted to sit in my red bag that I had left in the craft room after our last trip to visit my parents-in-law.  She's very photogenic.

Anyway, someone else stole the garden ornament from her, but they felt bad since she had said she was giving it to me for my garden, so they actually brought it as a gift for Matt and I to my mom's new year's eve party this year.  It was really sweet, so I decided I needed to make them a thank you note.  I wanted the thank you note to draw in some of the elements of the gift itself. 

To start with I cut out the shapes I wanted to use with my cricut using the Lyrical Letters and Mini Monsters cartridges.  I was really wishing I had the robots cartridge because I think it would have had a shape that looked similar to the garden ornament, but I was able to mix and match on the mini monsters cartridge to create a monster mash up.  I cut out the "It's Alive" shape at 3 inches in black, orange and blue.  I then cut out the eye background of that same shape in yellow and the black layer pieces in black.  I cut out the mouth from the Monsters shape because I thought it looked more like the mouth on the geeky guy.  For the lettering on the card, I cut out the word "Thanks" from Lyrical Letters at 1.5 inches.

Since this was a garden ornament I chose to go with a brown background so it looked like it was in the dirt.  I ripped out a piece of lighter brown paper to give it a "rough around the edges" feel and pasted my blue word on that.  I put the monster together and pasted it on the background along with the words on the light brown background.  Here's the finished product:

I always like to include some element of whatever item I'm either giving someone or thanking them for in the cards I make.  Here's another fun project I did recently for my friend Lindsey in Boston:

I made her a rainbow scarf by adapting this pattern and sent it to her as a January surprise along with the penguin card.  I spiced the card up with a piece of rainbow ribbon to tie it to the scarf better.  I was super happy with how it came out and she seemed to enjoy getting the surprise in the mail.