“You should make a get-well card for yourself. You’ve been sick all week.”

My husband suggested this to me Friday after dinner. It’s true — I have been sick all week. It’s been a week filled with soup, including the tasty shrimp pho I had Friday; annoying, harsh coughing fits; nights of interrupted sleep; and a sharp decline in motivation and creativity.

Friday was the first day this week that I started to feel normal, though you couldn’t tell by my raspy voice. I challenged myself to make a card in the eleventh hour for this blog. I’ll call it “being realistic,” because sometimes life presents a situation for which you must craft quickly.

Stay healthy, my friends.

Here’s how to make it:

Make a card from a 5-by-10-inch piece of textured blue cardstock. Cut a 4-by-5-inch piece of aqua cardstock and adhere it, centered, to the card’s front.

Cut a 3-by-5-inch piece of light-aqua textured cardstock. Cut a 2 1/2-by-4 1/2-inch section of cloud-patterned vellum (I used “Breakaway” from the En Route collection by SEI, with the bottom edge cut along a sloped line in the pattern) and adhere it, centered, to the light-aqua piece (I applied Therm O Web vellum adhesive to the top corners, then later determined the bottom corners needed adhesive as well).

Write “under the weather?” in black ink (I used Sakura Pigma Micron 01, .25 mm) on the light-aqua cardstock, along the vellum’s bottom edge. Affix clear, light-aqua and blue raindrop-shaped rhinestones in different sizes (mine are from Little Yellow Bicycle) and transparent aqua raindrop-shaped stickers in different sizes (such as teardrops in bluebell from the Rain Dots collection by Cloud 9 Design for Colorbok) in random fashion over the vellum.

Adhere the light-aqua cardstock, centered, to the aqua cardstock.