What to do with all these cards?

Well, for us foks who love making cards, sometimes the problem we face is what to do with all these cards? When our husbands ask why we need a new stamp/paper/ribbon etc, we need a good reason, not just to say that we need to make more cards to stash in a box in the cupboard LOL! So let me ask you, what do you do with the cards you make?

One of the things I do is make gift sets, like the one above. I like to make them all different but coordinated with matching envelopes and put them in a nice box.

Sometimes I make my own little boxes, here's a couple templates of different styles you can use if you want to make your own box:
card box template 1
card box template 2
Another option is to buy little boxes (saves a lot of time and fiddling), I get mine (little plastic ones) from Gina K.

The above set of cards and box I made last fall as a gift for my SIL since she hosted Thanksgiving. Given she spent all day cooking turkey I figured this was the least I could do :-) And it was a lot of fun to experiment and try to come up with different but matching cards all using generally the same materials.

Here's another set I did more recently, a seashore theme using pastel/neutral colours. To acheive a soft effect I used light sponging in the backgrounds with ink, and coloured the images with my watercolour crayons:

Sometimes we want to give a little thank you gift or birthday gift and this set of cards seemed like it would be a nice general set I could give to most folks that they could use for lots of different things. I put these in my stash so I'd be ready when I needed something....it's always very frustrating when I realize a gift or card is needed for the next day and there's no time to make it, so it's good to be prepared.

At this time of year I generally start giving away sets of Christmas cards for birthdays and other occasions in the fall months, so that the people who I give them to can use them for Christmas. I have a couple sets of these to work on in the next few weeks, I'll be sure to load up some pics for you once I do :-)

And for those of you who want a more close up view of some of the watercoloured images, here ya go: