Thank-You Notes from Color and Create Greeting Cards

You can probably guess this about me, but I don't buy store-bought greeting cards. I mean, we've got card stock and pens, so why not save the money for sushi and/or doughnuts instead?

Will's getting old enough that she doesn't love making her own cards anymore, so I might stock her up with some stationery cards sometime, if I ever see any with dragonriders or howling wolves or a catalog of medieval swords on the front, but Syd is still my go-to girl for cardmaking. She'll probably draw a fat unicorn on the front of your card, whatever the occasion, but homemade it is!

I received a copy of Color and Create Greeting Cards free for review the other day, though, and it's been kind of that perfect bridge between store-bought and homemade, great for those times when you want to make a handmade card but you're not feeling especially crafty. It's basically adult coloring pages in greeting card form. You can do one whenever the occasion arises, or you can fill them in whenever you like, listening to music and drinking wine, and then just pop one out, ready to go, when it's needed.

Syd and I have been living our lives listening to Story of the World v. 2 in order to keep up with the frantic timeline of Will's AP European History class, so we've been coloring a LOT while the audiobook plays. Although in this pic, it looks like Syd is actually secretly listening to her new obsession, Mr. Terrupt:

Yep, I knew it--Story of the World doesn't come in playaway!

You can fancy these cards up even more, if you're minded to, as I discovered when Will spilled her tea on the edge of the card I was coloring. I let it dry and colored over it on the front, but then Will cut around the design, making the edges more interesting (and cutting off some of that tea stain...) and I used double-sided tape to line the inside with colored paper, hiding the rest of the tea stain and making the card look different and interesting:

You should probably also do this if you insist on coloring your card with permanent markers, as permanent markers will bleed through a little bit, but I think my kids are the only ones who insist on using our permanent markers for Every. Single. Thing.

Using permanent markers for every single thing means that when you misspell something, you have to draw a giant star to cover it up:

And that's our first round of thank-you cards finished and mailed! If you've purchased something from the kids during their Girl Scout fall product sale, you can expect to receive a thank-you note, too! If you haven't purchased anything from them, but you long to support exciting adventures and girl-led experiences by buying nuts and candy, you can click through to the nuts and candy shop that Will created.

If you subscribe to magazines, you can renew your subscription through the magazine shop that Will created, and part of your subscription money goes to the troop.

Next month, our Girl Scout troop is going to spend the night at the Indiana Motor Speedway and ride our bikes around the track! For those of you following along on Girl Scout adventures, that's after we go to the Girl Scout national convention and before we spend the night at the City Museum in St. Louis. It'll probably be after we make shoeboxes for hurricane relief (if you make them when there's not a hurricane, then the non-profit can send them off right away after the next one) and certainly before the Christmas shoeboxes. It may be after our primitive camping adventure, depending on the late October weather, but who knows? The weather has been weird this year.