Make News with Love.

I guess this is one that I am very proud of. It takes a lot of work. But if there are a group of people helping you out, it cannot be that hard to finish.

So, this friend of mine is a writer, painter, singer, designer, cook…. Basically she is an incredibly creative person and extremely popular. While brainstorming ideas for what we can do for her, I wanted to make her something where we can creatively tell her how much difference she has made in all our lives. We wanted to shout it out to the world, so we decided to make a newsletter out of it, just not necessarily publicly spread.

In my years of gift making and receiving, I have learnt that when gifting people, they love to be spoken about, to get the attention, if it is genuine. The "genuine" is extremely important though. There is no use to saying good stuff if you don’t mean it, right? So give it a little thought, think of the things that this person means to you, of the memories you have shared, and what you genuinely appreciate about the person, how that person matters to you, and put it down just like that. It's an amazingly useful exercise to keep your relationships warm and fresh, and one of the reasons why I love gifting so much!

So anyway, with this kind of instructions, a bunch of us friends got together to create this newsletter. We wanted to include different aspects of magazines, newspapers, etc. and everyone volunteered to contribute something. We write articles, some general and some specific, we made crossword puzzles (there are websites which help you do it for free, just google a crossword maker), recipes to some of the dishes she made best, a fashion column, a free coupon to a café run by some of our friends, quotes, tips, you name it. We even had a page 3 with pictures of parties and captions!

We made this on Microsoft publisher with help from Adobe Photoshop, and voila! We printed it on A3 glossy sheets, and it looks rather good! This could also be done in a magazine format.

Another of the things we could have done was also print out copies of it and keep them in her birthday party, that way the activities like the crossword can also become interesting, and it adds a whole different flavour to the party!

Happy compiling! :)