Birthday card bonanza

Good grief! Every year I wonder what happens to the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Last year I felt like I barely had time time to get everything done, but I think this year is worse. We have our little tree up, and I put the lights on it, but so far it only has a few ornaments that my sister hung up. I have a few candles out, but my Nativity sets (I have a Willow Tree set and a Play Mobil one) and the rest of my decorations are still packed away. And with just a week until Christmas, I'm not even sure how much I'll put up at this point. I do have my shopping done, but nothing wrapped except the present I gave to my friend Kay when we met for breakfast this morning. Aargh!

To top off the craziness, I had decided a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to make a bunch of birthday cards to give to my grandma as part of her birthday present. Her birthday is Dec. 23, so I figured I had plenty of time if I made a couple of cards here and there after work and a few more during the weekends. Well, I only had two cards made when last Wednesday night I found out that my grandma's birthday party was going to be today! Wrench, meet my plans. So suddenly I needed to make twenty-two more cards in just a few days. And I didn't even have a whole Saturday to work on them because my mom, sister and I went to the theater to see Les Miserables yesterday (which was wonderful, but when all was said and done, took about six hours out of my day).

Well, to make a long story short, I ended up making twenty-two cards, and then I pulled out two already-made cards from my stash and stamped birthday greetings inside of them. That makes a grand total of two dozen cards. Each of them is different, and to help speed things along, I tried to limit the number of layers on the cards and to use a lot of the embellishments I have sitting around: various flower shapes, premade tags, charms, etc. The cards still look cute, but it cut down on the amount of time I had to spend choosing the perfect stamp set and layout for each card. Here is a picture of all the cards together:

I did take individual pictures of a few of the cards I liked the best, so I'll try really hard to post those pictures this week.

I hope you're finding time to enjoy this holiday season. Thanks for stopping by!