Crafting | Anatomy of a Holiday Card

I had mentioned on Facebook this past week that I was working on some handmade holiday cards.  A couple of my friends wanted to see what I was making, so I thought I would blog about my holiday card process.

For the past few years we’ve made our own photo cards using digital scrapbooking supplies.  I would create the card in Photoshop and then I would send it to some place like Shutterfly to get them printed.  This year, I decided to hand-make the cards.  This turned out to be a huge undertaking that I was not prepared for!  These handmade cards are taking a lot longer to make than I had thought they would take.  I think it didn’t help that I decided to make trifold cards, which had many more sides to decorate than the standard card.

The front of the 3.5 x 5 trifold card is decorated with a strip of patterned paper.  I die-cut the red scallop mat with Pure Poppy cardstock from Papertrey Ink and Limitless Layers dies, using my Sizzix Big Shot.  Then I stamped the reindeer in Pure Black ink onto Stamper’s Select White cardstock.  The reindeer stamp is part of Papertrey Ink’s Tremendous Treats: Christmas stamp set. 

I punched out the stamped reindeer using my 1.75” circle punch.  I colored the reindeer’s nose with red coloring pencil.  Then I used my dot roller adhesive to adhere everything onto the card.  The “Happy Holidays” stamp is also from the Tremendous Treats: Christmas stamp set.

The inside left of the trifold cards is stamped with different sentiments using the Stylish Sentiments: Holiday stamp set from Papertrey Ink.


The inside middle of the card is a photo I printed out 3.5x5 on our home printer.  Photo is from last December 25th at the beach.  I added “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!” in Photoshop first, then printed the photo.


I glued the photo to the inside middle of the card.  Then I cut out a strip of white cardstock and stamped a sentiment in the middle, using the Holiday Photo Finisher stamp set.  Then I adhered the sentiment strip over the bottom of the photo.


The inside right of the card is a custom designed shape I made in my Silhouette Digital Cutter software.  It’s an ornament with our name and year on it.


I cut out a whole sheet of the ornament in green cardstock.


After removing the die cut from the mat, I tied some Divine Twine in Holiday (red, green, and white) to the top of the ornament. 
 

Then I glued the ornament onto the inside right of the trifold card.  Here’s what the inside of the card looks like unfolded.

I plan to write a short personalized greeting on the other side of the ornament.

I’m making these trifold holiday cards in assembly line style.  I’m doing one step at a time to all the cards.  So for instance, I made the outside of the card first.


Then I stamped all the inside lefts with sentiments.


Then I glued all the photos to the inside middle of the cards and the strip of sentiment over it.  Then I glue all the ornament die cuts on the inside right, etc.  Like I said, these trifold cards turned out to be a lot more work than I had imagined.  But I’m almost halfway done with them and they do look really nice!

Here’s my list of supplies:

InLinkz.com