Gift and Card Ideas for a Friend

     Today, I’m going to show you a present that I recently got for a good friend of mine, along with the card I made for her (which is what justifies this blog post as that’s where the craft it).

     I know I love to make things but you can’t make everything so this present is something I bought. My friend is going on a trip over the summer so when I found this cute butterfly travel pouch on the Paperchase site (photographed here with one of my planners because I forgot to take a separate picture) it seemed like a fitting gift. I couldn’t just give at as it was though, I felt the need to add something extra so I bought a butterfly pen to keep with the theme. Still, that wasn’t enough. I needed to do something to personalise it a tiny bit so I added a few travel theme journal cards and a little notebook.

     That done, it was onto the card!

     I tried to do something different with this card and I remembered seeing a picture on Pinterest that had a card with buttons as balloons so that’s what I decided to do. I got a piece of brown paper to start with and stuck that on the front of the card as I thought the colour of the buttons I had would look better against brown rather than white. The next step was to pick out my buttons and stick a small length of string to each one. I tied the strings to the buttons but you could also use double sided sticky tape to attach the string to the button.

     After the string was in place, I used a small amount of double sided tape to stick the button to the card though I imagine this would have been a good time to use my glue gun. Using a small bit of washi tape, you can tie the dangling strings together to create your bunch of balloons. You can leave the card like that or stamp a happy birthday sentiment onto it which is what I did. It’s a pretty simple card to make but it looks really nice!

     In the inside, I just stamped ‘happy birthday’ using my quirky mismatched alphabet stamp set.

     And that’s my simple way of personalising a bought gift by adding a few extra bought pieces too it along with how to make a very simple card. Wrapping it nicely also helps – here I used some the wrapping paper that came in the Flow Book for Paper Lovers. I very carefully (I mean it when I say very carefully because I seriously suck with bows and ribbons!) tied a bow using a length of jute twine and a piece of red and white twine to match the colours in the wrapping paper and added a ‘happy birthday’ tag in contrasting colour to stand out.

     Sometimes presentation is the key to making a simple present look super nice (and sometimes expensive)!