Surprise Thank-yous

For the past few weeks I've been furtively collecting little goodies for thank-yous to 20 customers who really helped me get through the holidays on a tight budget. The sales from my two shops provided just enough money to allow me to buy nice things (mostly handmade, too!) for my family. It really made the holidays for us. Budgets were tight this year, but my customers came through. Hooray! 

So I wanted to send a very special thank-you to each of them. Something tailored to each customer, something cute and sweet and thoughtful. I spent my free time for the last two weeks sewing and binding and packing, and sent out 20 packs on Saturday. Full of goodies, as you can see:

That's a handwritten (and handstamped) thank-you note, a business card, a vintage vocabulary card, a handsewn fabric envelope pouch with a vintage button, vintage scrabble tiles that form a word, a handmade envelope of recycled paper containing poppy seeds (upon which I have painted poppies!), a handbound matchbook notepad with the customer's initial sewn upon the cover, and recycled paper gift tags. Inside a lovely muslin pouch. :D

I had fun with those scrabble tiles. I bought a lot of about 100 tiles, so with 20 packages, each got a four or five letter word, or two smaller words. Among my favorites were OOPS, ZOOM, IHUG, GEEK, READ and WOOF. Uh... yes, I did have a lot more vowels than consonants, haha! So most were double-vowel words. 

Each of the fabric pouches was different. I didn't have enough of any one fabric for any two pouches to be alike, not to mention I wanted them to be unique. So among the twenty, I rotated with a textured purple, red, brown, yellow, blue/brown striped, dark blue, spring green and white. Each with one color on the inside, one on the outside. They took a whole day to sew together on my somewhat broken sewing machine (the tension won't go high enough) but they came out so adorable. 

There's the whole pile all labeled and ready to go. Mostly US customers, except three international - one to Italy, one to Canada and one to Australia! 

The first two responses came today. Just the sort of reaction I was hoping for! :) I do love to make people smile. 

from metisRoss:

you you you! *flaps hands*

opening up my mailbox today, i did not expect to find the best thing to happen all week in there. :] you're so sweet it's giving me cavities. i hope you know those are expensive to fill. ;)

8] i'm glad to hear that you holidays were for the better because of the small things other people do. thanks for the thought, time and effort to send out something so completely unexpected. it just proves that the world is full of lovely things. thank you so much. :]

jesus, etsy is like the secret place where all the awesome people are. :]

from 4StarGalaxy:

Hi Iris, What a wonderful surprise!!!! I got your package today and have to say what a treat it was to get all the wonderful goodies. Thank you so much for being so kind and for putting that extra curve in my smile today. Sincerely, Roxanne

Hooray!! I have the sweetest customers. It makes me so very happy that they liked their packages so much.