How to dress up a boring pack of $1 cards

I love beautiful handmade cards, but I find it difficult to make 8-10 of them all at once. Plus, when you're pressed for time, it's all you can do to jot down thank you notes and get them mailed off.

Here's how I dressed up a pack of cards that I picked up from Michael's dollar bins (in just 3 easy steps!):


I love Melissa's modern calligraphy style, and I would have totally printed these out in a heartbeat, but alas, I am out of color ink on my printer, and I already had these in my stash.
1. Add a pretty sentiment to the front of the card.


2. Just add a fancy envelope seal, also picked up in the dollar bin at Michael's.


3.Add "faux-calligraphy" for the address like Melissa's and hop off to your local post office for some pretty postage stamps.  Try Centeria for your look-a-like calligraphy from dafont.com.

4. [optional] Beam stupidly at the post office lady when she admires your hand lettered letters, and tell her proudly, that, yes, you did do those all by hand.

Obviously, these still require a neat bit of handiwork, but I find that they have a nice hand made touch without having to design and make up a whole card from scratch.

Also, I love these Staedtler triplus liners, they come in a bunch of colors and have a 0.3 mm nib.  And the reason they're called triplus is that the barrel of the pen is actually a triangular prism, so no more pens rolling off the desk :)