Christmas in July Series - Part 5

Here's the final set of Christmas cards that I'm sharing with you all.  It is from last year and it was my first set that I made using Cricut. 

I have always been curious about the "snow globe" files, and thought that there would be a lot of potential to do something neat.  So, I decided to used the one from Joys of the Season cartridge, and contemplated for a while if I should weld the image and make a card, or the bottom part would open up and we would have a letter that fold out...  my final decision was to take the card idea that I made (Part 1) which would allow me to be versatile and can add various layers, and attach them together with an eyelet.  

Inside the snow globe, I wanted to put a picture of the family in the winterscape, hoping to make it look like we're inside the globe.  We all went for a family photo shoot, and once that special picture was determined, I printed them and ran each picture through the Cricut, cutting them into the shape of the dome.  I also cut the same size and shape in transparency, placing that in front of the picture acting as the glass dome.

The third layer was the whole snow globe, and it was important to pick fun Christmas patterned papers as this would still be the outer layer, and I cut Season's Greetings from Winter Woodland cartridge in foil cardstock to attach onto the bottom portion.

The fourth layer was the Christmas letter, and this was attached on the inside to the fifth layer, the backing layer.  I picked a solid cardstock to match with the front patterned cardstock and I embossed that through the Cuttlebug snowflakes folder.  I also scored the top of the back layer so it would be easy for the recipient to open the card and the letter, as well as make it easy for the card to stand on its own.  

I then added extra embellishments, the snowflakes (from various cartridges) with rhinestones in the middle snow globe, and I tied a ribbon around the globe.

Here is the completed picture of the card:

So, I now have shared all my Christmas cards and this now leads to this year's card. 

Anyone with good ideas???

Christmas in July Series - Part 3

For this Christmas card, we decided to create a book. Yes, it's literally a book. It had 12 pages, and it had a cover, an inside title page and table of contents, it had chapters, it had page numbers, it had illustrations and pictures, and ended with comments from the author (my husband). We mass produced about 110 of these books and our house turned into a publishing house for that
duration.

It is so hard to make family letters interesting. It is better than getting "to so and so, and from so and so", but letters that go on and on is just as bad. We had so much to share, but we wanted to keep the readers interested.

Again, going to my Scrapbook Factory program, we produced a cover with the title "The Most Unusual Book." We used the picture of the gingerbread house that my son had made, and printed this on vellum.

Every chapter we tried to focus on each member of the family, and incorporated a couple of pictures for each person and some art work. Trying to print this like a book was the trickiest part, as we had to print double-sided. We had to make sure that where we cut, it needed to line up perfectly with the back page. It was really confusing! After numerous tries, we got it and was ready to print.

We printed these pages all day. I don't know how many ink cartridges we went through. But after putting them together (we stapled the pages with deep-reach stapler), it was so well worth it.