Christmas Cards

 Every year, I want to send Christmas cards. The thought of postage though... it's like 80cents a card here. Adds up! Then on Facebook, I found out that the student leadership group at the high school where my kids go/went, was having a challenge to make Christmas cards for local seniors in senior residences. Students could get volunteer hours. Well, sign me up! Okay, sign up Megan. I started googling easy Christmas cards. I had trouble getting started, so I went into Design Space and found some free images and got cutting, figuring that Megan could make watercolour backgrounds, or even plain backgrounds. 

I had some glitter vinyl from Dollarama and cut snowflakes. I had a lot of trouble trying to get the settings right. Sometimes it cut all the way through, but more often it wouldn't cut deep enough. 

After making the house and the gingerbread girl, I wanted to do more with pens! I made some in simple rectangles, and some I did a little more with making a nice shape to cut out. I didn't really know at this point what size the cards would be though. 

I went to Michaels and got some Christmas paper pads. One was solid colour papers with embossed designs. It was nice and simple though some of the colours were a little strange. We got the table cleared off on a rainy/snowy Sunday and got to work

I cut the tree shapes, and Megan watercoloured them, and strips for for the sky.

This is upside down actually. The turquoise strip was left over after cutting out snowflakes. It was the perfect size for the card. The silver is very sparkly vinyl film from Dollarama. The card of the left, that's a free image in Design Space. It's #M47422. No Cricut Access needed. This one was cut out of the silver vinyl and stuck down to black card. That was not easy though. More ideas with it later

Megan took this paper that is embossed with birch trees, and cut the leaves out of a printed page with a full page design. She used fancy edge scissors to make the snow. She also put some snowflakes inside.

This snowflake is a two layer free design in Design Space. For the banner, I made a rectangle, then a triangle. Duplicate the triangle. Line them up over the ends of the rectangle and slice it out. Then a simple font for Happy Holidays. The tiny silver snowflake in the centre of the big one is from the snowflake panel card that was cut in the foil. When you weed it out, there are three tiny snowflakes that come out

I found the Christmas tree in Design Space, again, a free design. It's in three pieces, so it's easy to make the top star in a glitter. I used all sorts of green cardstock, and some of the green embossed papers. The snowflake was a free snowflake. I took a rectangle, centered it, and welded it to the snowflake. Then used a simple free text. I don't mind the "bubble letters". Sometimes I colour them in with the same colour, or with a contrasting colour. The Merry Christmas was made by welding a bunch of ovals together. The pointsetta I'll mention below.

Look how glittery this snowflake is, cut from the Dollarama vinyl. I found that sticking the vinyl to cardstock really worked the best over all. Trying to stick down the vinyl, with it's flimsy floppy snowflake arms, nice and tidy and straight...was hard. So, stick the vinyl to cardstock and run that through the Cricut.

There were lots of scraps of green paper. I took the same tree as earlier, and contoured out the trunk and star. Then I made a small rectangle, and an oval. I placed the oval at the bottom of the rectangle, then welded. Then welded that to the tree. Now it cut the trunk out with the tree.

I looked at cards I had, and Googled ideas. I downloaded a couple Christmasy fonts. And tried what should have been a simple task of writing text, and attaching it to a shape.

Design Space did an update and the whole Cricut world fell apart. Items couldn't be welded or attached properly. They couldn't get moved on the cut preview screens. It froze up. Then, add in my own True Tracy Way of doing things, and forgetting to change the paper size once I finally got it going...And then...Cricut decided to print over top of what it already printed...

Lots and lots of snowflakes! I have a large envelope full of leftovers.

The bottom left was the snowflake panel glued onto very glittery light teal cardstock. I love it! The top right one I really had to put on my thinking cap. I wanted it cut out of the card itself. I tried slice, but that wasn't right. Eventually, I realized I had to slice out a square from the card base piece (most were 7x10" so folded in half, they were 5x7") and then WELD the snowflakes to the cardbase inside the cutout square. Make sure to leave enough border between the cut out and the fold as it's pretty delicate. If you have a scoring wheel, that would make it easier to fold. I used turquoise cardstock, then a shiny silver cardstock from a little pad I got in the Christmas craft section at Dollarama.

I wish you could see how it glitters! This is a high impact card without a lot of work or materials. My favourite type of project!

More of the trees. Some were from the papers embossed with wintery designs. I wish my pictures were better but November/December is hard for taking pictures in my house. That pentagon on the bottom right was fun. To get the card shape, I made a pentagon and duplicated it. Then I flipped one upside down, and overlapped the point a bit, equally on both pentagons, then welded the two together. One card was made by slicing the tree out of the card base and putting tissue paper behind.

Some really basic cards, and some fancier ones. The embossed paper was nice in real life but hard to see in the pictures. 

The pointsetta design is free, from Pocket Wonders.   The two right ones were cut out of cardstock, the veins added by hand, and glued to the embossed paper bases. The hexagon one, I made a hexagon, duplicated it, put them side by side, then welded. Then I took the larger layer of the pointsetta leaves, and sliced it out of one side of the hexagon. I put red tissue paper behind, and drew on some veins.

The top card is a free project from Handmade in the Heartland. I used the embossed paper for the cardbase and forgot to set it for heavier paper and it didn't cut clean. Then I had issues when gluing, and well, there's a bit of shadowing look to the card. It's a nice card if you're a little better than me with glue. The bottom one took that Merry Christmas part that got weeded out, and I just stuck it to paper and cut around it.

These cards are from Shirley's Templates.  I'm not going to link to each one. My suggestion is to click on each year in the sidebar on the right, then scroll backwards till about Sept of that year. Do this for each year. She has a TON of free Christmas card designs. The top one says "Christmas Greetings". I thought it would show up okay in that striped cardstock, but it didn't, so I coloured in the white parts of the letters. It's better but not my favourite. I did add some little star plastic flat beads to the stars. Flat beads is not the right name. Like, shaped rhinestones, except they're from Dollarama. They have these little Christmas card making kits with sequins, beads, snowflakes, etc. 

The bottom card has the background cut from dark teal glitter. The "Merry Christmas" are on foam tabs. We weren't thrilled with how it looks off balanced. Merry should be at the top with two snowflakes. You can't just do that though because there is a white blob under where Merry goes. 

This is the middle one from above (I linked it). I LOVE it. the circle background is a fine silver glitter paper from Dollarama's tiny pad of gold and silver glitter and foil paper. In the very center I did add a silver snowflake from the cardmaking kit and a bigger white snowflake. It's a delicate card to cut out, but worth it! If you download any from her blog, be careful what you click on. You want the blue rectangle in the Media Fire box at the top right. Not any of the "download" buttons over on the left. 

I believe the top one is also a Shirley card. I used the weeded out bits to fancy up the other cards. Behind the Merry Christmas panel, I used sparkly gold foil vinyl from Dollarama, stuck to cardstock. It practically glows when the light hits it.

We did have to send a thank you card to someone, and the girls picked the Merry Christmas card but wanted a shadow layer added. I did that in Inkscape. I messed up the sizing on the first two tries, but this one is very lovely, with silver foil. It's amazing what adding just a little offset layer does to a project. I don't understand why Design Space doesn't have that feature. I also don't know why Blogger doesn't let you edit the photos within the page. 

We ended up contributing 30 cards! I hope to get started earlier next year (like...maybe next week?). I have lots of bits left over, and will of course look for marked down materials in the new year. The only cost for these was materials. I never thought I could do this when I first bought the Maker and everything I found was so not my style. I already have designs lined up for next year!!