Crafty Tutorial: Gratitude Cards

~by Kendal

Gratitude is a principle very important in our family. In my experience, aside from love, there’s no more powerful or transformative emotion than feeling thankful. I try to incorporate a gratitude meditation into each day, and it leaves me feeling very refreshed and very thankful for all the wonderful things and people in our lives.

We try to do things with Ava to encourage this, too. For the period leading up to Yule, we often have a ‘Gratitude Tree’ on our dining room table where every day we write down something we are grateful for – however small – and hang it on the branches.

Today, I’ll be sharing with you our recent exercise in gratitude – thank you cards! We did these specifically to thank people for the beautiful gifts they gave Ava for her birthday, and for coming to her party, but I like to do these for all sorts of occasions – sometimes just to remind someone special that we’re grateful for knowing them.

Since Ava can’t write yet, I wrote the cards and helped with their design, and Ava did all the finger painting, which she happens to love right now.

All you need is:

Card of different colours

Felt tip pens

Craft glue

Finger paints/ordinary paints to dip fingers in!

Ava is an Autumn baby, so we made Autumn themed gratitude cards – I used a selection of red, purple, orange, gold and green card, which I trimmed and folded in half to make into a good card size.

Then, I cut some orange card into rectangles (to fit onto the front of our cards) and drew a tree on each in brown felt tip pen. I gave them to Ava to finger paint leaves on in red and yellow paint (she enjoys making dots and cicrcles at the moment so I figured this would work quite well, and it did, until she got a paintbrush out and decided to paint on some leaves too!)

Whilst these were drying, I stuck some cream paper to the inside of each card, for writing on. 

Then, once the trees were dried, Ava helped me glue the back of each tree and we stuck them onto the different coloured cards. 

Ava was really quite pleased with herself and wanted to put them up in her gallery, but I explained we were giving them to people we loved.

And that’s it! Simple little Autumn tree cards to send to loved ones. I’m sure there are lots of ways to incorporate finger painting into card making and we might have another go soon for Yule cards.

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'I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.'

-G.K.Chesterton