I updated the Letter Tracing Activity to make it easy to print out traceable thank you notes. You can choose a picture for the top of the card, enter your own text, then print & fold the thank you note into a custom card. Your kids can trace the letters and draw a picture. The recipient is sure to love this custom touch!
You can print it out here to see how it folds up
You can edit it to make your own here
I finished this feature just in time to help kids write thank you notes for their Christmas gifts. For a little behind the scenes look at how this came together, here’s how it unfolded (pun intended):
About a week ago, I realized that my existing traceable thank you note feature would be a lot more useful if it folded into an actual card instead of being a flat half sheet of paper.
After telling my husband I was going to actually take time off of work for the first time in many, many years (it’s hard to take time off when you run your own business), I proceeded to start working on this thank you note idea.
Figuring out how to line everything up to print part of the card upside down so that it would fold correctly when printed was … tricky.
I finally got it working last night – just 3 days before Christmas. In the middle of trying to launch the new feature on my website, my 18-year-old son, who had had a Covid exposure over the weekend, told me he had a runny nose. The feature was half-launched, my website was down while I was working on the update, but I put it all aside to help administer an at home Covid test. For anyone who’s curious to know how the sausage is made, that’s how it’s made. Sometimes my business gets put on hold when the kids need me.
His test was positive, we made some quick decisions about increasing our already pretty thorough quarantine setup, and I went back and finished my feature quite late last night.
Today, Christmas Eve Eve, I wanted to announce the feature, and was reminded of how many hats I wear by running my own business. I can write code to flip text upside down without too much difficulty. Taking good pictures of the resulting product, though, is not something I do well. I tried last night with my phone camera, and the results were pretty poor.
I enlisted my husband’s help this afternoon (he has a real camera, and knows how to light it and not have shadows everywhere), and I got to work prepping the sample card we would photograph.
Not too many years ago, I had little kids in the house that I could ask to trace the letters on this kind of thing for more realistic pictures. Now that my kids are 18 and 15, that doesn’t work as well! Though my 15-year-old did helpfully suggest doing the tracing with a green marker. I tried using my left hand to trace the thank you note and it came out just looking like an old woman with arthritis wrote it.
My husband took a shot at it then, trying to channel his inner child. I think he did ok! It was better than mine, anyway.
He took the photos which were all much better than the shadowy ones I took with my cell phone last night. I made some marketing materials for Facebook and Pinterest, and wrote the text to explain what I’d made.
As I said above, I never cease to be surprised by how many hats I wear while running The Trip Clip. Some of them fit on me much better than others!
And now, I’m going to live up to the promise I made to my husband to put work aside for a bit this year, and focus on enjoying our celebrations as much as I can while we’re all quarantining with a Covid positive young adult in the house, who eats a lot and needs all of his meals prepared for him and delivered to his door!
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