"I'm Thankful For"

I wanted to make something like this awesome project but I wanted to make it using only things I had.  As I did not have a wood board or coin envelopes, I had to get creative.  I pondered it for a few days and was still pondering when I was rummaging through our office Monday night in preparation for Tuesday  night craft & Biggest Loser night. When you move in with someone, you end up with two of lots of things.  Two copies of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, two staplers, etc.  Well in my case, we ended up with three or four of somethings because boyfriend wasn't very organized.  For example, we ended up with at least four half empty boxes of envelopes (only one of which was here when he showed up).  I don't have a whole lot of use for letter sized envelopes, so decided that I could get rid of a bunch of them by using them for this project.  From there the whole thing just took off.

I too the envelopes and punched two holes in the top of them, one envelope for each day between Nov 1 and Thanksgiving.  I used metal rings to hold them all together. You can get the rings at an office supply store--I use them to keep my flash cards together (yes, I use flash cards in law school--how else am I supposed to memorize the names, facts, holdings and rules of 100 court cases?).  Then I decorated each one with the date and other scraps.  This is a great scrapbusting project.  I used my Cricut to cut out the numbers, but you could do it however you wanted.  I attached the numbers to the envelopes using packing tape because I wanted them to be sturdy.

The plan is that starting on November 1, boyfriend and I will write down one thing we are thankful for and put it in that day's envelope (I stuck blank notecards in an empty envelope on the bottom of the stack for this purpose).  Then on Thanksgiving we can go back and read them all.  We'll put it away until next year when we can do it again, and read the things we wrote about this year.  I'm hoping that it will be a really fun and meaningful tradition for us to start.