In early January there was a wonderful Limited Supplies Challenge to make sympathy cards for an NICU unit in Cleveland: Forums at Splitcoaststampers Well, my good friend (and SCS member) Karen Trueman is an NICU nurse right here in the Detroit area, so I asked her if she, Coleen (Briardlady here on SCS) and I could have our own little challenge and make some cards for her to have on hand at work. She really liked the idea, so we agreed to make six cards each, three boy/three girl (or six unisex). Karen's only requests were that we make them the normal A2 size and keep them fairly generic and non-religous. I chose to go the unisex route, and this is the inside of my card.
The image on the left is from the internet. I used Adobe Photoshop to make it more of a watermark in sepia tones, then loaded it into Microsoft Publisher to add the butterfly poem and printed it onto cardstock vellum. The font is Bradley Hand ITC. I trimmed it, ran it through my xyron and adhered it to the card. This is my favorite sympathy poem, especially for the loss of someone young, or even a pet:
"A butterfly lights beside us like a sunbeam
And for a brief moment its glory and beauty
belong to our world.
But then it flies on again.
And though we wish it could have stayed,
we feel so lucky to have seen it."
For the sentiment on the right I used Microsoft Publisher and printed it onto cream colored copy paper with just a thin border. It reads:
"May the love of those around you
help you through the days ahead."