Here are the cards I made and sent out this year. I was pretty happy with how they turned out. The tree card was a little bland, it didn't quite pop and wow the way the rest of them did. I'll have to do some thinking on what I'd do in the future to make it more impressive.
Full sized copies of each photo are in my gallery. Just click on the photo to see it.
I used the shimmer alcohol inks I made. I poured half of a bottle of an ink into another container, added Elmer's white glue and a bunch of L.A. Colors bulk shimmer eyeshadow powder ($.99 at Dollar Tree stores).
You can see the shimmer on the background of the paper (above). The holly graphic took five minutes to make. I stamped the holly, then used a watercolor pencil to color in the berries, and a Wink of Stella green brush marker for the leaves. Then I outlined the leaves with a green gel pen.
The sentiment was stamped and embossed. The sentiment came from Rubbernecker Stamps.
The box cards I made came from SVGCuts.com. This set is More Christmas Box Cards. The popup tree card is from Dreaming Tree.
I think this one was my favorite to make. It went together quickly, no problems. The circle in the front is actually a hole that frames an area on the first insert of the card. I decided to use a tree stamp that I've had for decades (I never get rid of anything). And since I'm so fond of embossing stamps, that's just what I did.
I used the same sentiment on all cards. That was the first thing I made. I cut out all sentiment sheets, used my alcohol shimmer sprays accordingly. You can see this in the photos below. The "lisaviolet December 2016" stamp was made with my Silhouette Mint.
Oh, my gosh, this Joy card had me losing sleep. The PDF files show you the basic cutouts for each part. On this piece of cardstock you'll cut out this and this and this piece. Well, I'm never happy with just these choices, so I start splitting the pieces apart and cuttng them separately using different colors of cardstock. See the hearts in the white section? I tried the plain white, red glitter, red foil, and settled on silver foil. The panels I cut out with a green glitter paper and ended up with a bright blue. I laid in bed trying to decide on what would look best. I also changed the lettering and snowflakes to silver glitter stock. The white snowflakes I cut did come in handy for the back. I brushed them with a Wink of Stella clear glitter brush and glued them to the back of the card.
The next time I do this sled card, I will use a metallic card stock for the base of the sled. Like the blades on the skates are silver foil.
You can see the different colors of the alcohol shimmer spray I used on the back of this card. I used the white, the green and the red.
This card took me the longest to make. Not satisfied with plain cardstock, I found paper online that was flocked. There were twelve sheets per pack. Unfortunately, there were also twelve different colors.
But I thought the flocking added to the cable knit pattern on the stocking. I made two red, two white and one turquoise stocking. What took so much time was the outside panels. I used a grey colored, textured cardstock. I embossed that and not pleased with how plain it looked, I used my Wink of Stella silver brush to paint the raised area.
This tree needs more. I don't know what, maybe the panels could be embossed or even cut out. I think it has potential, for sure.
And here we have all twenty-nine cards, folded flat.
And here they are all standing as they were made to.
And that's it for this year's cards. Feel free to ask any questions.
 |
~Mary
