Today my Christmas cards went in the mail! It's right on schedule for me, I'm always a day or two before Christmas Eve, sending mine out. Every year I think I'm going to get them out earlier, but every year it's almost the exact same day.
Each year I start thinking about my Christmas card in the summer. Not because I'm a long range planner, but because the new catalog comes out in the summer and I start checking out all of the new holiday stamp sets and accessories and trying to think of the card that will top last year's. Once the Holiday Mini comes out, I usually have a pretty solid idea of what I'm going to do. This year, as soon as I saw the ornament punch, I knew I'd use it on my cards. My original idea to do three ornaments, one for each child, changed quickly when I thought of punching out 375 photos for 125 cards!
Without further ado, here's some photos of our card making nights from last week:
When we first started, I hadn't even finished cutting all my designer series papers yet, so I gave each daughter a job to do while I kept cutting. Caroline's job was to cut the foam tape and hand it to Elizabeth. Elizabeth's job was to put it on the back of the ornaments I'd punched out, which were all face down on the table. Alexandra's job was to turn them face up when they were done and ready to go onto cards.
Once we had everything cut and ready to go, we started to assemble. I taped the designer papers to the card stock and they peeled off the little pieces of backing from the foam tape and taped the ornaments to the front of the card. I realized a little bit into it, that I didn't tell them to put the ornaments on straight. I had to do some fixing later on.
The night we did the stamping was a little bit tense. It took us a few minutes to get the right kid using the easiest stamp for them. Ultimately Caroline stamped the inside, Alexandra stamped the back with Created By, and Elizabeth stamped the Very Merry on the front. We used various shades of greens for the stamping. At one point we realized Alexandra was stamping Created By upside down. When I said something, she said, "Hey, I can't read, it all looks right to me!" I had to laugh. It was quite an accomplishment when we finished, and the girls were so proud of all our hard work.
I had each daughter grab one card to hold up, to show that they were all slightly different. I used a combination of Old Olive designer papers and some leftover Merry Moments designer papers (seen here) from a class I'd taught. I loved the Merry Moments cards the best, but I knew that I wouldn't have enough in a pack to do all I needed to do because I didn't want to use the brown patterns on my cards, just reds, greens and ivory or white.
Of course, when I signed the cards on the inside, I was sure to put the all important message on the back as well. I couldn't let their hard work go unnoticed!
A couple of little secrets to working quickly and efficiently:
1) I had a local office supply store cut my 3 packs of Real Red card stock in half for me, it's only $2.00 per cut and they cut it all at once for a grand total of $2.00. Then I only had to score.
2) I cut the designer papers and then just folded a portion of it back. Because our designer series papers are printed with an alternate design on the flip side, I only needed one piece but was able to showcase two patterns. So although it looks like two cuts of paper, one strip and one larger, it's just one and a fold, which I scored for neater folding.
I think those are the only little secrets I have this year. The rest is pretty straightforward. If you are someone I normally exchange cards with each year, I hope you enjoy yours. If you are not, I hope you've enjoyed seeing them here, and knowing what went into them!
To me, making the card is fun, but taking the time to make it with the girls, no matter how hard that is, is what makes it special. I know that I'm instilling a love for cardmaking and putting their heart and soul into each card, in each of them and I know we're making more than just cards, we're making memories too. That's what it's really all about. When we see our family and friends this holiday and they tell the girls how wonderful the cards are, that will make their day and I will know that it's all been worth it.
