Get something to drink, this is a long post. Settle in though it's all good! This new Pineapple stamp wasn't part of my first pre-order. I didn't think I needed it. Then I started thinking about how cool it would look to have the pineapple with a watercolored look. Then I thought, I need teacher gifts. How cool would it be to have a set of card for the kids teachers with a bunch of watercolored pineapples. The stamp came last week, (Tuesday). Most of the morning on Wednesday I worked on my 'watercolored' theory. Well............they weren't working as I had hoped, specifically I wasn't getting the look I pictured in my head. I tried lots of different ways, stamping on wet paper, spritzing after I stamped, spritzing the stamp before I stamped. None gave me the look I wanted, so I tried other ways too, gold embossing the whole thing, cutting it out, thinking of making 40 cards of either of those (10 cards per teacher), made me cringe a little. Today is the last day of school for Logan, tomorrow for Megan, so I was kind of on a time crunch, the end of May just kind of happened. It was April last week!
It's not that these cards aren't pretty, I'll definitely use them, it's just that they weren't coming out as I envisioned. I really didn't want to do the typical pineapple colors. I really wanted bright colors blended together. Doing 40 of them really wasn't going to work in the small amount of time I had to work with.
So I decided to scrap my watercolored pineapple idea completely and go for something else. The cards had to fit certain qualifications for me: I wanted to use the notecards, I wanted them to be colorful, they needed to be easy to mass produce in about a day, and I still wanted to use the pineapple. So I looked at what I liked from my 'test' cards. I really like the gold embossed pineapple. BUT embossing in gold meant I had to also emboss the greeting on vellum, I wasn't a fan of that idea for the amount of cards I needed to make, plus it didn't incorporate the colorfulness that I wanted, so I tried something else. What about just embossing the bottom of it?
Finally cards that I loved and worked per my visions! So I stamped and gold embossed the bottom of 40 pineapples. Really, this didn't take long at all, probably only about 45 minutes...if that, I had quite a system of doing 5 at a time. Plus, I really got to clean out a lot of my white scraps with just doing the bottoms. Once the bottoms were all embossed I cut them all out, because it's a simple oval they didn't take long to cut out at all!
The pineapple tops were all stamped on the white pieces that would go onto the cards. Because I only had to stamp the tops of them it went really quickly. Here's where my math got funky. I knew I had to make 40 cards. I wanted a variety of colors and greetings, so I decided on 5 colors, each teacher would get 2 of each color card. So in my head I had 10 cards per teacher, 5 colors, make 10 of each color. See where my math went wrong......I ended up with 50 pineapple tops and only 40 bottoms. I embossed 10 more bottoms and made 50 cards. Stupid math...... But it's fine it worked out. I'm giving the extra 10 to my mom for a women's retreat she's leading in June. But I also love the colors that I went with for these, the first picture I used Tempting Turquoise and Daffodil Delight. This picture shows them in 3 new colors! Sweet Sugarplum, Flirty Flamingo and Peekaboo Peach. I wanted colors that were bright and really colorful and fun, but not so dark that you wouldn't be able to read the black greeting over them. These colors all worked perfectly!!!!! Don't you love all the new ones! They all look so pretty with the gold!
Then I needed boxes for them. I used the Gift Bag Punch Board to make these simple boxes. I used a piece of white cardstock that was 12x7 and I used the directions for the 'Large' bag on the punch board. This was the perfect size for 10 cards. I simply decorated them with some of our gold printed vellum, I'm so bummed to see this stuff go on the retired list :( They're so simple and so pretty!
They fit perfectly! I also stuck a really simple mini 'thank you' card from me, a cool pen and a gift card in the boxes for the teachers.
The cards were simply bundled in some gold ribbon, keeping with the gold theme. All in all I'm so happy with the cards and gifts. Despite a couple speed bumps and complicated math :) they ended up great! I hope the teachers all love them! Bottom line though, even after all this I still really like this pineapple stamp, put it on your wish list for the new catalog! Speaking of, we are down to only a week until the new catalog releases!!! EEEEKKKKK!!!! I can't wait!!!!!! Thanks for joining me on this really loooooonnnnnng post. I hope it was worth it!
Thanks for looking see you soon!!!!
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