Christmas in July Series - Part 1

Usually this is about the time people that handmake their cards start to think about Christmas cards. For me, I start to think and stress about the next year's one as soon as the current year's batch is done. I do the designing of the card and my husband is always the writer. Every year we try to do something different, and I thought that I would share our past 4 years worth of creations.

This card was way back, before I got this crazy into crafting. I think the only "real" scrapbooking tool that I had was the eyelet setter. I can't even imagine doing all these with the hammer and the setter - "bang, bang" 120 times. (yes, that is about how many we make each set of cards). Now, thanks to Crop-a-dile, my life has gotten quite a bit easier, and with 3 kids, it's more realistic to be able to use the eyelets late at night.


I made this card through the Scrapbook Factory software, and created a "frosted" effect by using different layers. First layer was the transparency (we printed snowflakes and outline of the snowman), the second was the vellum sheet, the third layer was the photo paper layer with the rest of the graphics printed on it. We wanted to have the "ornamental" theme to the holiday season, and we used digital embellishments and added "magic" "spirited" "believe" to the card.

Inside the card, we printed our letter on a vellum to give it the "frosted" look, and but also printed the turquoise color and the border to the vellum as well.

On the back layer, we stayed with the "ornamental" effect, but added our faces to each of the ornaments. All of these were sent out in the clear envelope, and we also made matching return address labels.

All our friends loved it! and this was the beginning of the "I can't wait for your next year's card", "You have to out-do your last year's one" - something that we never knew we'd be getting ourselves into, something that we'll stress over each holiday season, but something that we'd get so much joy and pride from doing them.