Monogram Greetings

Lately, it seems my "hunger" to craft hasn't quite been fed as I would like.  April is always a busy month for our little family.  But I have been able to feed my creative self a little bit lately, even if it hasn't been as often as I'd like.
A few weeks ago, our little girly was invited to a birthday party for twin girls in her preschool class.  They're really nice girls and our girly always enjoys playing with either one of them.  Isn't it nice when your kids have good friends to be with in their class?  I'm really thankful for this especially since so much of preschool is centered around building social skills.  I'm glad for nice little girls for our girly to be social with! 
Anyway, shortly before this party I had been struck with some inspiration courtesy of this blog.  It's a site that focuses on creative gift giving--including the wrapping.  (She's got some neat teacher appreciation gift ideas too--since that's coming up soon.)  I don't usually go to too much trouble with my wrapping and packaging, but with my recent inspiration I made an exception.  And isn't it easy to make exceptions for nice little girls? :)  This was the result:

Some wooden monograms that we wrote "to" and "from" on the back of.  I purchased the wooden M's at JoAnn's for probably less than most cards.  (They were $1.29 each.)
Then I used these items to embellish:

All items from my scrapbooking and crafting stash. 

First, I decided how to best wrap the gifts.  One was perfect for wrapping paper, but the other was better suited for a gift bag.  I picked out the paper and bag and then went through my stash of scrap papers.
Found two that coordinated, and traced the letters onto the paper.  I laid the top side of the letter onto the back side of the paper so my pencil lines wouldn't be seen.
Then, I cut out the paper letter shapes. I used some liquid glue (mono adhesive) on the back of the paper, spread it all over and then laid it on to the wooden letter.  After some slight trimming with scissors to take care of edges that were too big, I used a large sanding file to smooth the paper edges flush with the wood.  (The sanding file came along with a package of scrapbooking chipboard.)

Then it was time to use some of these:

paper flowers

These ones are from a company called Prima, and they're meant for scrapbooking.  But regular ole' silk flowers would work just fine too.

Then I went to my bucket 'o buttons and picked a button that coordinated to go in the center of the flower.  Buckets of buttons are great, aren't they?  I'm sure many of you have fond memories of sifting through your grandma or mom's bucket o' buttons when you were younger.  Oh come on, you know you did!

The buttons in my bucket aren't quite as attractive as the ones I remember in my grandma and mom's buckets, but they're still fun.  And fortunately, I now actually have my grandma's bucket o' buttons at my house!  The buttons aren't used for crafts though.  They're strictly for sifting! :)  Or at least until I come up with some really amazing way to use a few of them.

So anyway, my buttons went on these monograms that turned out like this:

all up close and then

the whole enchilada

Oh, and I hot glued a piece of ribbon to the letter and stacked the flower on the top of that.  This gave me a way to tie them onto the packages.

the red one up close and

the whole red enchilada

Hope these inspire you to try something different on your next gift.  I'm sure I won't do this every time we give a gift.  (Actually, we've already been to another 5 year old's party and I didn't whip up a monogram for him.) But making monograms rather than cards was fun to do and a change of pace.