sewing thank you notes

so my birthday was over the weekend and i got a lot of great sewing related goodies (2 books, 3 fabric store gift cards and my threads magazine subscription came in!) there was also a lot of chocolate cake and a little wine ;) i have some pretty amazing friends and family. really, i feel so blessed. and they know me so well!

i'm really big on thank you notes. it's just a thing. what about you? do you always write them? do you care if you receive them or not? so i had some store-bought cards. but i also felt like getting a little crafty. and i had some blank cards made of nice paper, soooo...

i originally had the idea to cut out the words "THANK YOU" out of scrap fabric and stitch them onto the cards. but that would probably get time consuming and the cards are on the small side so the letters would also need to be small. and i didn't want this to turn into something frustrating. so then i thought i'd cut little triangles of scrap fabric and sew them onto the card in a pennant banner style. i wasn't loving it, so then i thought i'd sew different colored ribbons to make stripes across the fronts, and then i remembered all of the specialty stitches on my machine, so i said "forget the ribbons! let's try out these funky stitches!"

and this is what i came up with.

i have to say, i think they turned out super cute. i stitched across the envelope flaps as well. and i only killed one needle in the process! i started going too fast and it just couldn't take it. sewing through paper probably isn't the best thing for my machine, but i think it'll be alright.

i'm wondering if some of my friends won't know i have specialty stitches on my machine and will think i did it all by hand, like a robot. hehe