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. 🙂
As my first Christmas mini has been completely loaded with family Christmas pictures since last year’s holiday season, it was time to create a new one – yea! 🙂
I rummaged through my (by now fairly impressive) stash and came back out with the beautiful vintage-yet-fresh All is Bright papers, a 2012 collection by My Mind’s Eye. With its 18 x 25 cm (7 1/8 x 9 7/8″) it’s larger than its Tis the Season predecessor. It sports nine interactive page layouts, plus what I’m calling a box pocket on the inside front cover.
I created one of these box pockets before, in my large Girly Girl’s Precious mini (see picture below), but this time I incorporated it in a tutorial! It’s already waiting for you in my Etsy shop 🙂
Since the box pocket can hold all kinds of nice things, like a stack of photo mats, cards, a mini folio or even an entire hardcover notebook, I have not included my mini folio in the album tutorial. Instead it’s part of its own – very affordable – tutorial set, including a bonus cutting guide for a larger version!
Check out the video if you’d like to see all the fun & interactive page designs, and sing along with the Christmas tune: “Aaaaall is calm, all is bright….”
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! 🙋🏻
This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. In my previous posts I showed you several December projects, the first of which was a quick Christmas Mini Album, so you can start there if you’d like to see them all. Today: Part 7 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂
This year’s Christmas collection for me has been Nutcracker Sweet by Graphic 45. A couple of blog posts ago I already showed you a number of 4×4″ Christmas cards I created with this collection. ANd there’s more purple projects to follow, so stay tuned! 🙂
I always like to do double layout cards, by which I mean cards that have layouts both on the front and on the inside, which gives them a particularly finished look and adds a luxurious feel.
Today I continue my Purple Plethora of Christmas cards, with seven 4×6″ versions of Nutcracker Sweet!
Decoupaging is a great technique for altering projects, especially when you’re out of paper crafting ideas and want to switch materials a bit to stir things up again 🙂
This decoupaged set of a Christmas candle and a matching box is quite easy to make and will make for a great Christmas holiday afternoon. Plus, they’re a great little emergency gift set for that one neighbour you forgot 😉
The only materials you need are:
one or two Christmas napkins (the regular, layered paper ones),
some mod podge (and a brush to apply it)
the objects you wish to alter
And: some patience while it’s drying 😉
Note: if you wish to alter a candle like I have, please use special candle podge.
You can watch my free video tutorial on how to decoupage a candle to see how it’s done, and how easy it is!
This December month I’ll post many projects on my blog, to give you some inspiration and ideas for your Christmas projects – and also to help you spend your holiday time creatively. This week, Part 1 of this December Deluge of creative ideas 🙂
I’ve got a cute little Christmas mini album to share with you all: it’s kind of a mini mini album. For with its 4⅛ x 5⅛” (10,5 x 13 cm) it’s not quite micro yet, but smaller than average nonetheless. It’s fairly easy to make, for each page has the same design, and there’s only four pages.
I’m calling this one Caramel Christmas, mainly because of the color scheme of the paper pad I was using (some nameless Dutch brand) – it just reminded me of Christmas sweets like toffee, or coffee candy. Or caramel! 🙂
Both the album’s size and its small number of pages guarantee that you’ll only need one 6×6″ design paper pad btw – probably only about half at that.
All in all this is what you might call back to basics, or perhaps Mini Album 101 🙂 If you’ve never created a mini album before, I hope this one inspires you to try your hand at it after all! No time like the present right? 🙂 And if you’d like to know how to create this, you can check out the tutorial in my shop – which has 60 pages and 126 pictures.
Before you read any further: this album is for sale for a special opening price, so please check it out on my Showroom page! (International customers: please pay attention to the fact that international shipping fees will have to be added).
Tis the Season, yea! 🙂 I haven’t got my Christmas tree yet, but nevertheless it’s that time of the year again, which means holiday-themed projects for crafters all over the world! Soooo many gorgeous new Christmas collections and I haven’t even bought a single one this year. Not because I don’t want to create anything for Christmas, on the contrary. But since I bought like a gazillion Christmas collections last year, I’m afraid I’ll be not-buying any new Christmas collections the coming years until I’ve used up the ones I already own…. (Right. Like that’s going to happen! But: at least this year it is! 🙂 )
Anyway, here’s a so-called paper bag mini album, the pages of which are basically created from paper bags – and some cardstock. I really love this type of album, for it requires less basic construction than the usual cardstock albums, so you can relatively quickly move on to decorating and embellishing – which, you know, is grrrrreat! 🙂
The paper collection I used is North Country, by Prima Marketing, plus some separate sheets from other collections. I also used this paper line for my Christmas cards this year.
As I stated in my previous post, it’s never too early to create Christmas cards! 🙂
I used the 8×8 inch North Country paper pad and created 26 fairly large Christmas cards. I used different techniques, like die-cutting, stamping, layering, ribbons and of course my scrap mats. This older Prima collection doesn’t seem to have been used a lot, if the very small number of Youtube videos on it are any indication. So here’s my contribution to this apparently very small collection of North Country projects 🙂
Hopefully this helps you find some inspiration to create your own! Happy crafting! 🙂
A couple of blogposts ago I published my tutorial for a tri-shutter card. Since I’ve now sent out all my Christmas cards, it’s time to show you this holiday season’s version of a tri-shutter card – plus, how I made good use of the leftover scraps, as usual :-). Hopefully to inspire!
The paper I used was Holly Jolly by My Mind’s Eye. Enjoy!
