Make Your Own Note Cards
L-R: Norah, me and Janelle (with the white lipstick and glinting braces) on Christmas Day many, many years ago.
If you know anything about the dynamics of the sisterly triad, you know that the oldest is too cool for school, the youngest is the clown, and the middle one lives a life torn between having fun with the bratty younger sister or being cool and bitchy with the oldest sister. This is just to explain why, at Christmas time, my sister Norah gets lovingly crafted gag gifts and my sister Janelle gets lovingly crafted gifts. Janelle has neither the space nor the patience for gag gifts and certainly does not have a carefully curated powder room gag emporium like Norah. Janelle is far too busy playing bridge, going to the theater, playing pickle ball and going to lunch to indulge in the sort of laughter that makes you snort milk out of your nose. So when I make gifts for Janelle, I put on my big girl panties and take an extra dose of Concerta, then hunker down and imagine what it would be like to be mature, so that I can think about what sort of things such a person might enjoy.
HOW TO MAKE REALLY NICE NOTE CARDS
One thing a mature, oldest-sister-type LOVES to do is write notes, promptly and appropriately, for everything. So a few years ago I made Janelle note cards with a picture of her house on them. She had been to one of those benefits that mature people who sit on lots of boards attend, and had won an artist's rendering of her house in a silent auction. She sent a pdf of the image to me so that I could make it into note cards. Why didn't she just do it herself? Because when you have a geeky tech-head for a youngest sister, she's the one who does that stuff. It's a family role thing and you don't mess with it.
There are a couple of ways to print your own note cards for people. Avery makes printable note cards with envelopes that I have used many times, but I would not use them for Janelle, because you should not expect someone like Janelle to write on note cards made by Avery. So for Janelle's notes I ordered a couple of boxes of good Crane writing paper. (This is a good place to remind you all, in the words of my grandmother, the yankee Bostonian writer, "Dahling, never say stationery, say writing paper.") Because the note cards were not connected to form an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet, I had to hand feed each one through my printer, but it was worth it to print them on really nice paper. I know she liked them because I have made her refills at least once since then.
My friend Debbie says she made note cards for her bridge playing friends last year and had them printed by Snapfish, which sounds like the easiest way yet. A quick Google search shows that there are many online options like that, including Vistaprint, Overnight Prints, and my personal favorite, moo.com, which is the site I used to print my adorable business cards.
NOTE CARDS FOR ORDINARY PEOPLE
Once I had experienced the thrill of making notecards for Janelle, I started making them for everybody I could think of using all sorts of different images. My niece Rosalie, who you will remember was immortalized in my rapping debut, bought a great old row house in Richmond. I took a photograph of the house with my phone and used filters in Photoshop to transform it into a faux drawing and made that into a card with a vertical orientation. To the right is the photograph of the house with the faux drawing I used to make the note cards inset.
By now I was officially on a roll, and Rosalie's sister, Emily Ann, was next. Emily Ann is an artist, and I had seen some really interesting pictures she had created and posted on Instagram, so I grabbed an image and made her some note cards that featured it. It appears I developed a fast fetish for filters from making Rosalie's card, because apparently I made her several different versions of the same image, applying different filters for different effects. In retrospect, I think applying Photoshop filters to an artist's work is probably not the best idea, so I'm not recommending that. In my own defense, by the time I started making Emily Ann's cards, I had long since taken off my big girl panties, and my Concerta had definitely worn off.
The year of the note cards was back when my daughter/blog coach, Lawler, was applying to colleges and we were knee-deep in digital portfolio bullshit. It's probably not that difficult to create a digital portfolio nowadays but, back then, the colleges hadn't decided what the standard would be, so some wanted slides and some wanted CDs and some wanted paper and it was a frigging nightmare. I wasn't going to let all that hard work photographing her art go to waste, so I made note cards out of some of those images too. I think I gave these to Norah because, even though she has a quirky powder room and likes to laugh at my jokes, she has very good manners.
So you see? You can make note cards for people that they will really enjoy out of things that are dear to their hearts. Or you could just use all those prohibited signs you learned to make yesterday, because those would make fun note cards too.
If you are shocked to hear from Youngest Sister three times in three days, brace yourself, because there are more Christmas gift ideas to come! I hope I have started to stimulate your creative juices. If you have any great gift ideas, please do share them below. I might be jealous that I didn't think of them, but I will be most certainly be polite, like my sisters.