Red Stamp

No one is paying me anything or giving me anything to write this post.  I just like to share the cool stuff I find with you all from time to time.

I suck at thank you notes.  I mean, really, really suck.  It's not that I'm ungrateful, I'm just really busy, and for some reason finding a stamp is as hard in this house as finding tape or a pair of scissors that is still suitable for cutting fabric (seriously, family, lay off Mommy's scissors!).  Excuses, excuses, it's one of the things on the short list of things I wish I could change about myself (we don't need to get into the rest of that list, it's depressing...  But I'd like to be in a single digit size between now and when I die, and also I really would like to cure my chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome).

And then I found out about Red Stamp, and everything changed.

Red Stamp is an iOS app.  You download it free from the app store, then you give it permission to muck around with your photos and your contacts, and BAM!  Instant thank you notes.

Seriously, look at the one I made from our Halloween picture in like 33 seconds:

Or this one that I sent to my mother-in-law after our trip to Chicago:

Or this one I sent to Uncle Doug and Aunt Kathy:

Once you've designed your card, you can email it, text it, save it to your camera roll, post it to Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or you can pay $1.99 to have Red Stamp print it and send it to your recipient in the actual mail!

I am using the heck out of this thing.  Sure, the same functionality is available from a variety of websites (I've used Shutterfly for the past several years to do our Christmas cards, for example), but this app is so quick and so slick, and it makes sending personalized thank you notes so easy, that I have officially run out of excuses.  I don't have to plug in my camera, upload to my computer, walk uphill both ways to the post office...  I just choose the cute layout (and they have a lot of cute ones!), choose the picture, change the text, choose the recipient, and hit "MAIL IT!"

The other thing that I love is that they're something that the recipient will actually keep and enjoy, rather than just reading and saying, "Oh, that's nice," and tossing away.  (Actually, I keep every single personal piece of mail I get, from letters to thank you notes to Christmas cards, but I'm crazy like that.  Most people don't.)  I wish I had found the app before we left the Jack Hanna show, because I would've taken a picture of the kids.  I found it later that same day.  I just happened to have taken a picture of the logo on the wall and the screen to blog about it. 

So, there you go.  I just made your holidays a LOT easier if you have an iOS device.  You can just email me the thank you note.