Happy Holiday season everyone!
Let’s create some easy-to-make Christmas cards together: shop your stash (I did! 😃) and make good use of the tips, tricks & tutorials I’m sharing with you in the below videos! Let me know what you think in the comments.
Have a very merry Christmas and a blessed New Year!
You can watch my free video tutorial for my deconstructed envelope card here:
Hope you found these tips & tutorials helpful, either for your Christmas cards or for any other occasion!
There have been years that I’d finished all of my Christmas cards by September – having started as early as July – and heaps of them at that. (You can check them out here.)
But not this year. This year I’ve only just finished my very first Christmas card last week. What can I say, I’m not crafting as much as I used to – though one of my new year’s resolutions is More Crafting, so I remain hopeful. 😇
I have to say it was fun to create again, after many moons with hardly any papercrafting at all (except for the occasional card here & there, which I posted here, on my blog).
Here are my design steps:
1. I started by shopping my stash and I found this fresh & modern looking design paper by S.E.I., called Kris Kringle. It is no longer available, however I’m hoping it will inspire you – either to shop your own stash for some great finds, or to shop for similar design papers that evoke the same atmosphere if you like these specific papers.
2. Some baby blue cardstock became a nice base for the card, echoing the occasional light blue the design papers offered and off-setting the rest of the colors nicely.
3. I wanted a special card design so I decided on this slanted tri-fold shape and folded it ‘zigzaggingly’ (I don’t know the official term but I think you’ll catch my drift 😉 ).
4. One of my label dies came in handy to add a stamped sentiment to the front of the card.
5. Tri-fold shapes are always fun because they give you six panels to mat and play with your design papers! You’ll have to keep your embellishments flat however, otherwise your card won’t fit into its envelope. Stamping is a good option of course, as would be (heat) embossing or adding some ink sprays.
In conclusion
All in all I had fun, maybe even more than I expected. It was nice to think about a specific friend and design a card with them in mind. What shape hadn’t they seen from me yet, what colors would they like and what kind of sentiment would they appreciate. Happy thoughts to be pondering.
I’ve found again and again that tailor-making a craft project for a specific person adds an extra dimension of inspiration and fun to my craft projects. Maybe this can be the way forward for me – and who knows, perhaps for you too! – for the foreseeable future, to find some much needed inspiration again!
I might even do some video tutorials again on my Youtube channel (which I always embed on the blog too), so let me know if you’d like one for this type of card – or mini album insert of course, whichever might fit your needs best!
Have a blessed New Year every one! And thank you for your continued readership and support in 2022!
So, speaking of last year, apparently I forgot to post my 2022 Christmas cards here on my blog after uploading it to Youtube last December…. However, the tips are still useful, for they are for card making in general, not just Christmas cards.
So imagine any occasion you’re planning to celebrate with a card, sit back & relax and apply every tip to your own cards. I hope you find some inspiration, not only by way of card ideas but also to avoid the Chore Trap of crafting. Enjoy the video 🙂
For all of you who are anything like me and are in dire need of some quick, last-minute Christmas cards, I’m sharing four tips to create them!
In my previous post I already shared a step-by-step on how to make the cards in the above picture.
So to summarize: tip 1 is the regular papercraft way of card-making: create designs from cardstock, then mat each seperate part with design paper.
The next two pictures show tip 2: die-cut a sentiment or an image from specialty paper and stick it onto a mixed media background. Then mat on top of cardstock.
Here are the materials I used for both of the above backgrounds:
Tip 3: create a mixed media background, but don’t use it as a background. Instead, die-cut something from it and stick it onto some white cardstock. Clean. Simple. Elegant.
These are the sprays I used for these:
Tip 4 is of course a mixed media die-cut on a mixed media background. Add some glitter accents if you like.
Bonus tip: if you’re not a mixed media kind of crafter, you can use design paper instead! This will give you the same elegant and sophisticated effect, both on white cardstock and on design paper.
Now off you go, hurry up with those last-minute Christmas cards! 🙂
For my first batch of 2020 Christmas cards I planned on scrapping up an entire 6×6 inch paper pad and make 7 cards in the style I showed in my previous blog post.
To that end I have a tip for you: to avoid being overwhelmed by an entire pad, just rip out all of the sheets and make little 3-sheet stacks – for you’ll need 3 sheets for each card (plus some cardstock of course).
In the end I made only one card in the style I planned; then I went with the creative Flow and made five more cards, all in their own unique styles. Oh well, plans are made to be thrown out right.
The point being, don’t let those pesky little paper pads get the advantage – you’re the boss, so rip them apart and use every single last one of those lovely sheets. You go!
Stay crafty, see you in my next!
Only two more days and then it’s Christmas! So, time to share two more Christmas cards, each with a special design that makes it just a little bit more Christmassy 🙂
The first is a tri-shutter card, for which I have a free video tutorial available. The second is a gatefold pocket card, which you can fill with nice tags and pictures.
Enjoy the video, and of course a Very Merry Christmas to you all!
This week I’m sharing my annual Christmas card tips with you again, this time for those of you who would like to make their own Christmas cards but don’t have time or energy to design and create a lot of elaborate, unique cards.
Tip #1: Only decorate the fronts of your cards, and leave the insides and backs plain;
Tip #2: Use a die-cut card block, filled with all of the materials you need to create a set of nice cards, like design paper and a lot of die-cut punch-outs. You can add your own glitter glue and dimensional tape to add some more interest of course.
So check out the examples I created using such a card block, this one by Studiolight, and I hope you feel encouraged to make some of your own!
So, it’s that time of the year again 🙂 You can never be too early creating your Christmas Cards. The coming weeks, like every year, I’ll sharing lots of Christmas card tips with you, helping you along to get yourself unstuck and go create your own! It really doesn’t have to be difficult, nor expensive! To prove this, I’m kicking of this C-card season with several easy-to-create lowbudget Christmas cards that I decorated with only 1 sheet of design paper! And of course a few extra embellishments, but you can even do without those if you want to – or perhaps have to because of budget reasons.
So go ahead and check out the video, and then go ahead and Create!
So, I’ve got a lot of stickers – through no fault of my own mind you 🙂 They’re usually added complimentary to a paper collection or some such. Or they come so incredibly cheap that I simply cannot help myself 😳
I find that although I like the idea of them, I don’t use very many of them. I mean, what do you do with those flat sticky things that in most cases turn out not to be even that adhesive in the long run.
Since I had an especially large number of stickers to go with my All is Bright paper collection (by My Mind’s Eye), I decided they should be used up – or at least 75% of them anyway.
So, here are some ideas for those of you who, like me, don’t know what to do with their darned stickers. 🙂
In my last blog post I showed you my first ten Christmas cards, created with two so-called card art stencils.
This week I have two extra tips for all of you who are preparing to get your craft on and make your own Christmas cards for this year:
There’s actually a third tip hidden inside the video, namely to use what I have dubbed scrap mats, in other words: meticulously paper-pieced background mats. Check out my free video tutorial on how to make them – you’ll get a lot more paper real estate from your leftover papers!
Stitches: stamp by Crealies
Recently I decided to experiment with Dutch Doobadoo’s card art stencils, which you use by simply tracing around their various edges to two nested shapes. So I bought two of the stencils and created ten (early) Christmas cards, using a cherry red cardstock as a base.
I decorated with the Warm Winter Wishes paper collection by Marianne Design and die-cuts from the wonderfully cosy-looking Scandinavian Winter collection by Studiolight. In the video below I show you all ten cards, all of them sporting “Joyeux Noël” (by Crealies, among others) as a die-cut sentiment – a.k.a. Merry Christmas in French.
I really enjoyed working with these stencils, their ‘fun factor’ definitely exceeded my expectations. Plus I found them a very useful alternative for a die-cutting machine, so they are perfect to take with you to places where you know you won’t have access to any die-cutting tools (like when I go to my mom’s 😉 ).
So enjoy the end result and let me know if you have any experience with these or other card art stencils! 🙋🏻
So, for the final post of this year 🙂 I’ll leave you all with one last Christmas card tip – which you can of course use the whole year round: combining several paper collections for a paper craft project. This offers fun new challenges, for you’ll have to really think about colors and patterns: which ones coordinate well together, which combinations provide some elegant tensions and what color of cardstock will benefit the whole.
For these four Christmas cards, I mixed three paper collections and added embellishments from another four companies! I’ll list them all below. I also did some die-cutting of my own, which is always a great way to add to your projects.
Materials used:
I also used a Crealies Create-A-Card die for the step card.
Have a creative 2017, create what you wish existed 🙂
