The Busy Little Card Maker

Stella’s mum recently asked her little girl about how she would like to farewell her classmates. The Supergirl had grand plans but we all know that she will never be able to achieve them all, so she was asked to seriously trim down her plans. After much consideration, she decided to give each classmate a homemade Christmas/Farewell card and a small lollipop from Suga (a lolly shop). She had originally wanted to make star shaped ginger biscuits but her mum steered her to the idea of store bought lollipops instead. The Supergirl and her parents worked together to come up with a suitable message and had it printed on sticky labels. My job was to help the little card maker make the cards. She and I didn’t come into agreement immediately. Stella had wanted to make complicated 3D pop-up cards but I simply couldn’t see how she or I would stick to the repetitive work of making multiple copies of them. In the end we agreed to decorate a card with glitter and sparkly sequins, an idea we got from a book that Stella was thumbing through for ‘research’. Using a Christmas theme stencil set of mine, we painted a chosen shape with PVA glue on each card and then sprinkle glitter on it. Before the glue dried, we had to shake the excess glitter off. On the next day, the little card maker and I would begin decorating the previous day’s batch by sticking on some stickers and sequins to dress up the card a little bit more.

We have now been repeating the same two day cycle on the days that I worked, churning out 3 or 4 cards every two days or so, for nearly two and a half weeks. Results wise, that may look quite poorly but this little card factory is only operational for around three quarters of an hour after school per day. And just like big name brand factories, this production line also experienced a few minor bumps along the way. A card or two were ‘accidentally’ damaged during manufacturing process and another two were withdrawn because the little card maker reckoned that they were unsatisfactory. And yet another one was also damaged by an over enthusiastic young apprentice (Bree). All of these had to be replaced ‘painstakingly’ by hand, taking up even more precious time. LOL. Today is the last day of production. We have successfully created enough cards for the whole class plus a couple to spare. Except for the message printed on a sticky label, the spare ones are left blank without the name of a recipient. I breathe a sigh of relief now that they are all ready for distribution. The girls are probably happy that this project is now over for good.