Mr Cardmaker Makes the Mostest for the Hostess

Well, we were invited to dinner last week, and I didn't happen to have a good bottle of wine hanging around the house. The temps were well below zero ALL DAY, so I was NOT about to head out in the cold to shop around for a hostess gift, so, of course, it was off to the craft room!

My hostess had given us some lovely flowers at Thanksgiving and with the flowers came a lovely little gift card.
A handmade gift card, mind you, which I had not made.
Now, this girl has received MANY a card from me, so she KNOWS that I make cards. Oh, she KNOWS....

Now, I managed to restart my breathing, and got my vision cleared, and I decided that I would give her the benefit of the doubt, and believe desperately cling to the idea that she got this card as a GIFT from somebody, and did not seek them out herself.

HOWEVER, I was not about to let her go wandering the streets with only some interlopers gift cards on her person.

I had to make her these--

So, do you make cards like these?

DO you make them a 3" square like I see so many people do?
Can I just ask, WHY?
I guess the answer is clear, if you're starting with a 12x12 piece of card stock. Then, mathematically, you are perfect.
I don't have heavy weight 12x12 card stock, so I used my 8 1/2 x 11 usual stuff, and it occurred to me that if I made these cards 3" square, I'd chop up a ton of paper, with tons of waste, for nothing.
HOWEVER! If I did them at 2.75", I could get SIX cards out of one sheet of card stock, with a tiny 1/4" strip of waste.

It's the evil card stock hawkers at work, with these 3" cards, I tell ya...

Anyway, the cards are super simple, a couple of stamped leaves, some washi tape, a die cut leaf and banner, and a punched and stamped flower. And some white gel dots, because they make everything better. Easy.
I did punch up the flower a bit by adding some white enamel accents dots around the center pearl, but you could go without, no problem.

Now, these would have been a lovely gift, right?
But, no. I HAD to do more. Because I'm crazy like that.
Because I needed envelopes if I was going to make those other gift cards look puny and insignificant.
And, that's REALLY what I was making here...
But we all knew that, didn't we.....?

SO, out came the vellum, which DID make me have a TON of scraps, because I had to make those big enough to HOLD the perfect sized cards I so cleverly came up with...
Lots of glue dots, perfectly lined up so they all just make one dot on the vellum....and some of that Lick&Stick liquid envelope glue, so you can seal the envelope.

BTW--This is taking WAY more time than I allotted for this project, as you can imagine...

BUT WAIT! Whatever shall I deliver them in? I just used the last of my acetate boxes for my last gift....
I'll make a BAG! Because of the aforementioned "crazy like that."

So, more vellum (oh, and I ripped the first one by scoring too hard, so DOUBLE that effort), some scor-tape and some washi.

Then you have to pack it up so it looks gorgeous, with SOME of the cards IN the tiny envelopes, so you can see how that works, but some of them OUT of the little envelopes, so you can see the card through the BAG, and one of those has to face the FRONT of the bag, and one has to face the BACK of the bag, and the empty little envelopes have to be hidden in the middle of the whole thing, so they don't look all lonely....

Oh, and the cherry on TOP of the crazy--

I just couldn't walk away until I had clear embossed my name and website on the outside corner of the bag. 
Really?
REALLY?
Apparently...

So, lifting my exhausted, sweating, got-nothing-else-done-today butt off the craft room floor, I go to the front of the house to see that Charlie has come home with a lovely bottle of wine for our hostess that night.

We brought the wine with us. Just the wine.

Yeah.
I left the cards at home.

Anybody wanna buy a set of gift cards?

*SIGH*

Thanks so much for stopping by!
All Best--
Richard