My Christmas Wish

Still need to make your Christmas cards? Here's a quick tip - use stickers for the main images to save time. Stickers can be really expensive in today's market but if you shop around there are a bunch of nice but inexpensive ones you can pick up on sale that have a lot of card possibilities.

I came across a pile of Christmas stickers I brought for just this purpose years ago and decided it was time to do something with them. Here's a card I've been mulling over for the past week but didn't feel like completing until today. The sticker is flexible acrylic so it adds some dimension that you can't see online but it was an odd size relative to most of the Spellbinders dies I have so I ended up mounting it on a square mat and then putting that on a baroque Sizzix Tim Holtz Alternations image I had die cut for another card I have been mulling over but hasn't quite come together yet.

The distress inking was inspired by the background of the sticker itself and I think it does a nice job of tying everything together. You could just use brown kraft paper if you didn't have the supplies to do the inking, but the inking adds more color variety and interest. I also tried to airbrush the background with Copic markers but just using the little air can wasn't much fun since its freezes up very quickly. I really need a small air compressor to use if anyone reading this is wondering what to get me for Christmas.

If you want additional instructions on the card, just click on the image to go to my website.

Affordable Christmas Present Cards

Remember these two cards from this blog post on April 30th?

Well, that same stamp makes a great Christmas card too. I upped the size of the card to 5x7 so I could fit words on it this time. I like cards that are good for almost any present giving occasion like these are but I wanted to change this one up from what I done already.

Last time I used some inexpensive BIC markers but several of the markers in the BIC set reached the end of their useful lives months ago and I didn't know how far the red or green would still go. The dead colors didn't last as long as I had hoped they might so I didn't think I'd be able to get through make a set of these with used ones. I thought about using Copic markers since I could just refill the red and green as needed but then I would have shaded it and taken a while to color each present and I wanted to do something quicker and more within reach of the average stamper this time.

I had a few fine point red Sharpies that looked like they had a good amount of ink in them at one time so I figured I'd use them up before they dried up. I got a brand new green out of another Sharpie set to bring green into the present so I could use it for the mat. I colored 20 of these on a single red and green that are still going strong. I left a bunch of areas white and added Stickles over those and popped up the present and words with dimensional foam to give the card that little extra it needed.

One thing I did learn though is that the alcohol in the Sharpies can get to you after a while. It's more like pure rubbing alcohol and after a while of coloring my eyes started to burn a little from the marker drying in my face. If you color with Sharpies, I'd recommend moving finished images as far as way as you can while the rest of the alcohol evaporates.

Here's the finished card. As always, click on any of the card images to go to my website if you want the full directions or want to see the larger images of the card.

Quick Christmas Stripe Card

Here's a quick and fairly easy card to make for Christmas. All you need is some nice Christmas themed patterned paper, a border punch and a few Christmas stamps.

Since the green stripe covers 2 inches of the card you could just use a 3/4 inch section on the left and a 1 3/4 inch section on the right instead of a full sheet. If you are using a 12 x 12 sheet that lets you get more than 8 full card fronts from one sheet instead of just 4. If you have scraps from another project you might also be able to put those to use for a quick card or two.