I had great plans for December and here it is, already the 10th. My lack of production is actually the perfect lead-in to today's topic: the Christmas card. Every year I try to juggle creating the family Christmas card with everything else going on in our world. This year was particularly busy with the shop but I'm adamant in keeping with the tradition of making my own Christmas cards to send so I needed a compromise.
This year, because of the craziness, I employed the strategy of semi-handmade. After taking 10,000 pictures for the card and not liking any of them, I chose the best of the bunch and then headed on over to Persnickety Prints. Rather than going to the card templates, they have a blank card section where you can design your own. I added the photos the way I wanted with a background color and left everything else blank. This is what I ended up with:
I knew I wanted to mat these so I left borders around each side that I could crop down. The entire card was cropped 1/4" both vertically and horizontally and matted with Gina K cherry red card stock, an awesome color, by the way.
I then grabbed some Stampin' Up wasabi card stock and stamped a Papertrey sentiment in the cherry red ink, layering everything. Here's the finished product:
I'm really happy with how these turned out. I saved time by digitally designing the photo portion but did so with an eye to how to finish them off by hand. Of course I'm still scrambling to get them done but with the time I saved by delegating some of the work, I'm feeling less stressed about getting them finished and am able to enjoy the process rather than it being a chore to finish.
Next time you are strapped for time, try out the semi-handmade method. It's an awesome time saver and stress reliever!
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