My holiday presents to myself was a variety of Eline's Animals dies and, to justify the expense in my own mind, I wanted to use them immediately and make cards for my Twitch community. They're so wonderful and support me in anything I do, which means so much to me. I wanted to give something back. But I'm not very good with deadlines and expectations. So what I did was I asked them, without context, what their favourite animal was based on the few animal dies that I had purchased. Once they responded, I made the little animals accordingly.
Only one of them answered "dog", so I was able to use her own dog as inspiration for the colouring. I also tried to include favourite colours on the turtles, as there were a few of those. Since I don't have coloured cardstock, I decided to use white and colour the animals with my Copics. It was easy to enjoy myself and come up with colour combinations without having to cut multiple pieces of paper and many passes in my Vagabond cutting machine.
As I was trying to decide how to get the animals to my friends, and how to make cards for them, I ended up receiving an order from Honey Bee Stamps that had a free gift in it: a pack of patterned paper sized for card backgrounds. It was perfect! Even the number of sheets was exactly what I needed. That issue solved, I found a smaller 3x4 piece of paper in my inventory, matched those to the new Honey Bee Stamps gift papers, and my cards were ready!