Learn and Play -Cascading envelopes

Wow - May was a crazy month!  I was so happy with all I got done on National Scrapbooking Day and the week following but then I didn't have a chance to make anything the whole rest of the month!  It was the last month of school and I am so happy to say now it is summer!  I am looking forward to staying home with my girls and getting my yearly dose of stay-at-home mommyhood!

To end each year, I make the group thank you card for our daycare sitter.  She is a phenomenal lady and we like to get her a gift for taking such great care of our kids all year long.  We are all teachers and she is a teacher's wife so the school year only schedule works great for all of us! I have made a word book and an exploding box in the past.  This year I saw something called cascading envelopes and wanted to give that a try. Here is the final product:

There are five envelopes, one for each child plus a final envelope for the parent thank you.  I decorated the envelopes by adding the phrase "Learn and play at Tara's" down the fronts of the envelopes.  I used the DCWV Animal Crackers paper stack for the background papers.

Learn from Out of Character at 2.75"

& from Letter Envy at 2"

Play from Out of Character at 2.75"

@ from Letter Envy at 1.75"

Tara's a mish-mash of letters from Out of Character, cut between 2" and 3"  The shadows are hand cut.

In each envelope, there is a thank you from the child. On one side is their picture (my daughter pictured here) and on the other side is their thank you along with a drawing from them.

The back side of the envelope looks like this:

When the whole thing is folded up and wrapped with Trendy Twine, it looks like this:

And from the side:

One thing I learned a little too late is that the thicker your project, the more envelopes and embellishments, the farther apart you should glue your envelopes.  I really would have loved to have my first envelope seem farther apart so it doesn't bow so much but live and learn. :)

She enjoyed it and I hope you do too!