I am horrible when it comes to writing and/or sending thank-you cards. I’m pretty sure it stems from my childhood and the memories of the hours upon hours I would spend chained to my desk, hand-writing notes to relatives I hardly knew for gifts I wasn’t thrilled about receiving in the first place. It’s not something I’m proud of; in fact, I resolve every year to turn over a new leaf and become a better card writer…yet another resolution I have yet to follow through with.
My youngest daughter just celebrated her third birthday this month. Obviously, being only 3, she’s too young to pen her own thank-you cards, and goodness knows I certainly can’t be relied on to write them for her, so this year I decided to employ the help of the iPad. My hope was to find an app that I would find fun enough to keep me motivated and on task but at the same time interesting enough to my daughter so that the idea of writing thank-you cards in the future wouldn’t seem so dreadful to her.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many kid-friendly card-making apps out there. I ended up downloading Martha Stewart’s CraftStudio. I figured I couldn’t go wrong with the Queen of Craftiness. Originally, I had envisioned my daughter and me cuddling up on the couch and making the card together. Yah, that lasted all of 2 minutes. In her defense, besides being only 3, she has whatever Spring funk is going around now and just isn’t feeling very well. So, while she went off to rest on the other couch, Martha Stewart and I settled down and got to work.
This isn’t an app review, but I feel a need to say a few things about CraftStudio in order to continue. First of all, it’s just kind of “meh.” I think for your average non-crafty person, it’s quite adequate. However, for someone like myself who has an entire room dedicated to all things crafty and everything in-between that might hold some crafty potential someday, this app is limiting enough to be frustrating. However, that being said, cards belong to a genre of craftiness that holds no appeal for me, so it’s probably to my advantage that the app got to the point without too many embellishment options.
In the end, I got the card done in less than 15 minutes, and that includes the time it took me to figure out the ins and outs of the app. My 3-year-old did help in her own way. With the choice of hearts or stars as decorations, she chose stars; she even decided on the color yellow. The rest was all me. As you can see, however, I didn’t do much beyond that.
Even so, I got the job done, and I actually had an okay time doing it. Better yet, my daughter was excited about the end product and the prospect of printing them out and mailing them to everyone. Win-win in my book!
If there’s an app you use for making cards, please share in the comments section. I’d love to hear about your experiences!
