My day job is Master Writer at Hallmark Cards, and I don’t blog about it too much, but this summer has been so fun and exciting that I can’t resist. Hallmark introduced four studio collections, each one featuring the work of someone on their creative staff, and one of those collections is mine! (Bryn is a pen name, but I prefer to use it on the blog 🙂 )

These cards came out of project I worked on in summer of ’14. It was a few weeks after my kidney donation surgery, and I was ready to come back to work early, but my surgeon recommended working at home for a week first. Because I had thought it would take me longer to recover, the studio hadn’t scheduled me to do anything. So I worked on a little collection of quirky and positive messages. I had no idea they would turn into my own card line!

Here are a couple of my favorites from the collection! (They are a bit hard for me to photograph in my studio at home because they are so shiny 🙂 )

I didn’t design the cards — I just wrote them. I told the design team I thought they should be bright and sparkly, and wow, did they deliver. I think they came out great! In fact, I may have framed some of them and hung them up in my own living room…

There’s also a journal in the collection, and I even have my own wrapping paper and a gift bag! I told the gift solutions team that when I give birthday cards to other people, I always write at the bottom that I hope it’s their best year yet. So they made wrapping paper and a gift bag that says “best year yet”!

My family and friends have been telling me when they see my face and my cards in the store — and every time, it just makes my day.

Not too long ago, I went into my local Gold Crown store to buy my September Yankee candle (yes, I have candles of the month) (September is Macintosh, in case you were wondering), along with a card and a Wonder Woman Itty Bitty to send to a friend of mine. I had been working out and I had no makeup on, my hair pulled back in a ponytail, and once I was in the store I thought, Oh geez, I hope the sales associates don’t recognize me. There’s something I never expected to think about. (They didn’t.)

I haven’t always gone incognito, though. When the cards were first out, about six weeks ago, I went around to different stores and was like, “Hiii, soo, those are my cards over there…” in the dorkiest way imaginable. It was awesome.

It’s funny — you work really hard at a lot of things, and some things don’t work out, but then again, sometimes good things happen when you weren’t even expecting them. I feel really lucky that this came together, and I’m wishing you some lucky things, too!