Life Without Copic Markers

Here's a card I made a year or two or three ago, that reminded me of another reason I'm really glad I got Copic markers. They have nice flesh tone colors. When I made this I tried every marker set in the house and could not find a usable flesh tone color for Santa's face. They all looked like he'd just come back from a week at the beach without suntan lotion or like he was a pink alien. I ended up having to leave his face blank and I'm sharing the card here in its original form.

The card does show an interesting use of the snow foam they sell in the large chain craft stores at this time of year. The foam is really made for other stuff like painted wood, which is what I first used it for, but it works just as well on paper as a thin layer.

Here's the card. As always click on it if you want the supplies and sizes.

Will Work For Freezer Space

Here's a much more complicated and time consuming Christmas card to make. This one combines two different types of glitter and coloring with Copic markers.

I had originally wanted to try to create a whole scene with the snowman but the practical reality was this is a fairly large stamp that barely fit on an A2 sized card and I prefer using A2 for anything like a Christmas card because it's easier on supplies, the envelopes aren't hard to buy and it usually comes in a little under the 1 oz a single stamp covers in the US.

This lead me to simply cutting the image out since there was no way to mat it. I like the effect stamping in white creates so stamping snowflakes to go with the snowman was the obvious choice, especially since the white ink in the background helped the white snowman in the foreground to go with the paper better. You have to be careful with white pigment ink though, or at least the one I'm using, because it takes a while to dry and the stamp pad is very soft so it tends to get all up in the stamp if you aren't careful.

None of the individual steps of this card are really complicated and they lend themselves to doing them in batches if you wanted to make a lot of them. You could easily change the coloring out for another technique, or simple non shaded marker colors if that's all you can do.

Once I had the pattern down it still took about 20 minutes per card to make these, not including the drying time for the glues and sealers and inks, which is something to think about if you need 100 of them.

If you want to see the full directions, just click on the image or here.

Playing With New Stuff From Last Year

I tend to collect things for future Christmas cards that I like as they go on sale and put them in a special container for use later. This next card was the result of getting out that container and trying to put some of the stuff to use. If you like Martha Stewart craft products, this uses a bunch of them.

The blue paper is actually made using a rubber stamp. I really like it but I wish they had made the stamp slightly larger because what you see is the entirety of the stamp and it would have been nice to be able to cover the entire card front. I could have stamped a second one next to it but the repeat of the pattern would have been obvious.

Instead I decided to play with a glitter technique I've never done before to make a border. I stuck some super tacky double stick tape on the edges and sprinkled glitter over it. You need to use a super sticky tape for this to work. I tried using regular ATG tape and it didn't have enough hold to get good coverage.

Originally I tried using a super fine glitter. Unfortunately in order to cover that wide of an area, I used three strips of tape and the tape lines were totally obvious after glittering. In order to avoid this I used Martha Stewart's tinsel glitter which is available in large bottles in the local major chain craft stores near me right now for Christmas. The product didn't scan well for the post, but it has individual strips of tinsels that stand up all different direction when you stick it to tape. It looks really good in person.

The next obvious thing would have been to add a snow man to the front but I have already made one snowman card (coming up next on the post list) so I didn't want to do that. Instead I opened up three snow flake punches I had gotten a previous year to use on Christmas cards and just punched them out on white. I thought about glittering them but the punches have a lot of things to cut out so I didn't want to stress it with preglittered paper.

Here's the finished result. As always with my posts, if you want a full list of products, size or directions, just click on the image to go to my website. There's also a version there with just one type of snowflake on it.

Christmas Sentiment Tree Card

Here's a great Christmas card to make.
It's great because:

• It required a limited amount of supplies, especially if you already have stuff to do embossing.
• All the supplies came from local craft stores at 40-50% off.
• Each card does not take hours to complete. There are a lot of great cards out there but most are too labor intensive to be practical if you have a lot of relatives and friends you need to send cards too.
• Most importantly, it looks nice.

Since this is the first Christmas card post of the season, I'm going to try to do a giveaway. Post a comment on the link below on the original blog post by Nov 14, 12:00AM EST. For every 25 people that comment, I'll giveaway a pack of 4 of these cards to a random winner until I run out so spread the word!

Enter here: http://sharedcards.blogspot.com
The blog feeds out many ways to multiple sites. Feel free to comment on any of them, but if you want to participate in the giveaway you must comment on the main blog post above.