Christmas in July Series - Part 4

I'll share a Christmas card from 2 years ago that we made, again, having the "present" concept. This time we wanted the card to actually look like a present, so the recipient can untie the ribbon and fold open the box.

I didn't know if it was possible to have a box that would fold open, but with long time searching the web, and numerous trial and errors, we finally came up with something that we were thinking of!

I used a double-sided cardstock and folded 110 of them. I wanted to keep the inside of the box one pattern and the outside, another pattern. Unfortunately, when you fold this, the outside sides come out inside pattern, so I had to attach an outside layer to the box to make it look clean. Confusing, isn't it?

Inside the gift, of course, we put in presents. We put in a picture of the family (our faces juxtaposed in JibJab frame), a copy of the Christmas drawing my son drew, and our Christmas letter, which was inside another envelope and had a warning: Do not open! This idea was taken from the beginnings of Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events books.

Anyway, we put everything in, tied it with a ribbon and put a gift tag on it. I took a picture of the completed cards before I sent them.

Christmas in July Series - Part 2

For this card (3 years ago), we decided to create a pop-up card. We wanted to send out something so that when friends open, they would be WOWed and feel like they opened a gift.

As I mentioned before, Robert Sabuda's website, has templates for making your own pop-up cards. We came across a Christmas tree one, and thought it would be cute to have that open in the middle with our Christmas letter surrounding it.

I imported the template into my Scrapbook Factory software program, and used that as a guideline to draw a similar tree, and I hand drew with my Wacom pen all the ornaments and Christmas lights border for across the top. I got my husband to write his letter once again (yes, he has a sarcastic and loving sense of humor as you can see when you enlarge the photo), and I made the text fit around the tree.

I printed this onto a photo paper, folded in half, cut along the cut-lines, made it pop-up, and attached that onto a patterned-cardstock, leaving enough on the side for us to paste in our family photos.

We got a lot of comments on this card, and how they would never throw this one away. This again created another stress for us - we knew that people looked forward to receiving our cards, and that for next year, we need to out-do this one.