Getting crafty with hand-made cards

A lot of new traditions at this new place. One has been the general friendliness of folks. It has been nice to be on the receiving end. Then there has been the introduction to "sorry cards". This from my daughter; when someone in school upsets you or even deliberately makes fun of you, and then regret it, they say sorry with a sorry card. She has received a few - scribbled with her name, often mis-spelt for her, as hers is a bit difficult for her classmates. The joy in collecting or giving them - and the real offence often long forgotten.

And then there was this note from school - asking if one wanted to order 'wensen kaarten' (seasons greetings cards). I had declined wondering who all would I possibly send them to. Especially in times when SMSes and e-mails and WhatsApp and phone-calls are sufficient. Maybe I did not recall then the tradition of writing and posting cards for New Year, back when I was a child! Sometimes we bought them with the Diwali cards itself. Especially since we stayed away from the big city and never knew when next we could make a trip. My father would let us choose and we would be hard put to choose between the red geraniums, the blue bird carrying a yellow basket in his beak or one of those natural landscapes or well.....too many choices.

After making our purchases, there was this task of filling them - all with a red pen only. My father would fill them right up to the address, while I licked or glued them shut and put the stamp on. All this would've been done by the second week of December latest. The 3rd week onwards we would receive a lot of cards in the post and for a few days some of these would adorn the mantel piece. Some would be saved for craft purposes, some trashed - yes, that is the life cycle of a season's greeting card.

Back to my present, this is the first year here that we've seen kids giving out greeting cards to each other. Big G has received quite a few and lil G too, one even landed up in the post-box for her. Not to be outdone, and at the same time wanting to be creative, this is what we

came up with. The cards are made with easy quilling shapes mostly, and this is the design we followed from here for the Christmas Tree. For the envelopes, I did not want to go through a sticky-cutting and pasting effort, so we went the Origami way and made them like this.

Lol, I know it is strictly hand-made work but we are still learning.