From the Heart & Hands

The holidays are a great time to DIY: do-it-yourself. Homemade and handcrafted gifts get you extra points with family and friends. The thought really does count when it comes to giving a gift from the hands and heart.

What an endless list of possibilities! Crafts, food items, artwork, dog goodies, photographs, certificates for babysitting hours, bath items, knit scarves and much, much more. Another idea works as both a gift and as a greeting — a hand-made, personal DIY card.

In gradeschool kids spend the time leading up to Christmas cutting green trees and red balls out of construction paper and gluing them onto folded cards, also made from construction paper. Every cutout goes on Flat Stanley style – glued flat onto the sheet with the red balls placed on the tree limbs.

Somewhere along the line, someone figures out to glue the folded edge of the green tree to the sheet. Flat Stanley becomes 3D Stanley and the possibilities become endless. And every parent and grandparent who receives a card saying “Merry Christmas” dusted with a glitter snowstorm absolutely loves and treasures it.

I’d like to claim that I’ve graduated past the glue and glitter stage, but that might put me on Santa’s naughty list. However, when it comes to card making, my wife and her friends are “card years” ahead of me.

Using card stock, cut to size, they stencil and glue, stamp and scallop, to create these amazing looking cards. They have die-cut machines for cutting out images or even phrases such as “Merry Christmas” or “Thank You.” There are embossers for creating raised impressions of snowflakes, trees, hearts, symbols and much more. Sometimes cards are reprocessed — images and patterns clipped from one card end up with new life as decorative elements on another card.

One of the beautiful things about DIY cards is that anyone can make them. The options are limitless and their complexity depends on the tools of the trade, which are available at many crafting stores, including Michaels, Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Stores and Hobby Lobby. To find extra inspiration or ideas to get you started, simply enter ‘card making’ in the search box on Pinterest.

If there are kids or grandkids in the house, card making is a great activity to share with them. Kids love to be creative, and while stimulating their imagination, crafting cards is also a great teaching and learning opportunity. From young children practicing their fine motor skills while drawing and cutting as well as learning colors, letters and numbers, to enhancing older kids’ spelling and writing skills, as well as their ability to express ideas and feelings through art, making something on their own instills confidence and a sense of pride in kids of all ages.

During the holidays, DIY cards are also a wonderful way to direct children’s thoughts to making someone else happy instead of focussing only on their own letters to Santa.

Furthermore, working together with your kids or your grandkids while creating and crafting is a great way to connect with them. It’s a chance to learn a few new things about their lives as you work and chat.

The opportunity to connect is certainly not just for kids.

For my wife and her friends, as they work on their cards, they engage in the time-honored activity of socializing. While catching up on each other’s lives, the card making is sometimes secondary to just getting together and sharing stories.

As their time winds down, each has a stack of cards that will go out for the holidays, wishing friends and family a Merry Christmas, season greetings, or even a simple hello. Some are wrapped together in bundles and given as a gift for the receivers to send to their friends and families – who doesn’t love getting a card in the mail? Some are created to be sent after the holidays, as Thank Yous.

Personalized and beautiful, each of these cards contains more than pretty images – they carry love and hope and the touch of human hands. These cards are presents in themselves, gifts from the hearts and hands of their DIY makers.