Fresh look for award-winning Thanksgiving card

Our playful, silly, international award-winning Pumpkin Pie Starter Kit Thanksgiving card needed a fresh look. I had in mind photographing a slice of pumpkin pie and adding a fun new font. Quick & easy, right?

1. Find the perfect plate

First I spent hours shopping for the perfect white plate. I searched for one with a raised white-on-white design around the edge, a subtle yet more festive choice than the plain-Jane white plates in my cupboard. You’ll notice I wound up scrapping the plate in my final card design.

2. Bake not one, but two pies

Turned out I’d need to bake two full pumpkin pies and go through almost an entire can of whipped cream to get a slice of pie I liked. My first mistake was stopping for dinner with a friend and letting the frozen pie thaw over dinner. Second mistake, I turned the ‘frozen’ pie box over to read the baking instructions. That meant the now liquid pie filling sloshed over the pie crust rim. As I baked it, the thin sweet pie filling coating burned & blackened all the pie crust edges. Back to the grocery store for pie #2.

My second pie turned out much better. I learned from internet bloggers steps to cut a good-looking refrigerated pie slice (or at least better than my messy first trial runs with my hot, charred pie #1). First I needed to let the pie chill thoroughly. Then, following instructions, I heated water and let my knife sit in the hot water for ~15 seconds. Voila! A pretty clean slice, a little crunched pie edge on one side, but not bad. I made several attempts at a good looking blob of whipped cream. (Turned out to be worth wiping the whipped cream off the same slice several times and trying again as I didn’t have many pie slices turn out well.)

3. …and now Photoshop

Add a fair amount of time in Photoshop. I reconstructed the crunched pie edge and to ditched the plate I decided just cluttered the card. At last the slice of pumpkin pie with whipped cream, at least, was good to go! I’ll spare you my hours searching for a fun new font. Finally found one I loved, but it was too skinny. Back to Photoshop, where I fiddled for hours to fatten it up.

2020: A year to send your first Thanksgiving card?

This card makes me smile. Thanksgiving doesn’t alway come first to mind as a card sending holiday, but this year, we may not all be enjoying big family Thanksgiving gatherings like other years. I usually drive hundreds of miles to run a Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot 10k with my daughter (okay, she runs, I trot) and then we enjoy a big family dinner with my daughter, her hubby & in-laws and her brother…but not this year.

Many may forego big family Thanksgiving gatherings to keep loved ones safe from possible uninvited viral guests. So maybe this is a good year to let family know that although you may not see them, you’re thinking about them by sending a smile with our Pumpkin Pie Starter Kit card. By the way, this card features a real plantable Sugar Pie pumpkin seed…and boy, not much beats a made-from-scratch pumpkin pie in my book. Maybe you’ll find a Sugar Pumpkin will be ready to harvest and bake into pie for next year’s Thanksgiving!