Christmas Card Making 2016 – VI

     Hey everyone, how’s it going? Getting real close, only three more sleeps till Christmas day now. I’m getting excited – I’m really looking forward to Christmas dinner!

     Unfortunately, I can’t speed up time to make it Christmas day now but I can help distract you, if only for a few moments, with another blog post about Christmas cards and I swear, this is actually the last one. The cards in this blog post are the ones I sent out to all my pen pals (all those others were ones I made for my mom) so to any pen pals who read my blog but haven’t gotten their Christmas card yet, (I hope it arrives because I sent them all out two weeks ago), here’s a sneak peek!

     So, remember that advent calendar with the pockets in the frame that I showed you at the start of the month? Well, those pockets were made from 6×6 pieces of card that I cut down to 4×4 size to make those pockets. Cutting the card down to size left me with quite a lot of scrap pieces. It just so happened that the next day I was out shopping and in Art&Hobby I spotted a die-cut set (for really cheap!) featuring three different hexagon sizes. Taping the three dies together with a little washi tape, they fit perfectly on the scrap pieces of card so I cut out a ton of hexagons and pieced them together for my cards!

     Waste not, want not as they say!

     Especially because the patterns are so cute, and glittery! I actually hate glitter, I really hate loose glitter. Really. It just goes everywhere and never goes away! But I do like a little sparkle every now and again so it’s nice to find card like this where no glitter comes off at all!

     For the stamp, I found a ‘Happy Christmas’ stamp in one of my sets and actually cut it in half so I could put the two words on separate lines to fit into the top half of one of the larger hexagons. Not a perfect fit for the medium and small hexagons but I didn’t have anything smaller.

     Actually, the cards I made for myself to send off to pen pals ended up being quite simple.

     A lot of what I did was just simple layering of patterned card, white paper, patterned card and stamp, like above. Although I did add some ribbon into some. The brown ribbon I used is actually from an autumn set of ribbons and says ‘especially for you’ but I thought some brown ribbon would go nicely with the card. I also cut some card to stick on the envelope to make it match and added a sticky label for address space.

     I used a tag stamp for these cards that had three lines in the centre for writing and stamped it in brown ink as it was less harsh than black. I found another stamp in a different set that said ‘may all your Christmas wishes come true!’ and the word heights fit perfectly with the line spacing. However, it was on two lines, not three. That was easily remedied with a scissors! That’s the great thing about clear sentiment stamps with phrases, it’s usually pretty easy to cut the stamp up so you can separate the words and make them fit.

     Although in some cases, I just didn’t use any sentiment on the front of the card because I didn’t want to take away from how pretty the paper was! With the card above, I simply added a bow onto the front panel, stuck that onto a piece of white paper to give it a border and then stuck that onto another larger piece of patterned card.

     I pretty much left the A5 card pack I got do the work. It was one of those brands that you find in euro stores and only cost around €1.50. It might have been cheap but it had a lot nice and different patterns in it. Bar the hexagon cards, all of the one in this post were made from that one card pack! With the cards above, I turned the snowflakes in white into baubles, drawing the lines with a black pen and then adding some bows.

     One of the card patterns in the pack was simply the phrase ‘merry Christmas’ over and over again in different fonts, colours and sizes so I was able to cut out some sentiments from that for my cards.

     These last two cards are very similar, featuring repeating bauble patterns. They’re quite nice so I didn’t want to add a sentiment to them but to add some interest, I used my 1″ circle punch to punch out the centre of the ornaments from another piece of the same card and stuck them on with some foam dots to pop them up a bit.

     So those are the cards I sent out myself! I hope most of them have arrived at their destinations my now. I know they’re very simple designs but I quite like them. They didn’t take much to make at all, just one A5 card pack that cost €1.50 (which I used most of) and the scraps from another project! I made several of each design and was able to make about 20 cards in one day!