Christmas is three months away!

Sorry, don't mean to be an alarmist, but it's kind of creeping up.

I always tell myself that I'll make Christmas cards throughout the year and then I'll have plenty when it comes time for Christmas.  Somehow it never quite works out that way.  I counted up how many Christmas cards I have so far this year and it came to a woeful five.  FIVE.  And truthfully two of those are left over from last year.  Sigh.

So I need to get cracking on my cards, but I don't want to mass produce them because I kind of hate mass producing and I think it takes the joy out of making a card for someone.  At the same time, I can't afford to take the 1-2 hours it normally takes me to make a card (I know, I'm slow, and indecisive, and I make mistakes).

So this year I'm going to do my best to create scaled down cards, and mass produce in a fashion.

This means I pull some Christmas stamps I want to use and a pad of patterned paper.  I do all the stamping, images and sentiments, at once.  Next I select/cut the patterned papers, then I go back and color.  Once that's done, I'll add limited details and assemble.

For today's set of cards I pulled out some of my Essentials by Ellen stamps (Tis the Season and Christmas Scribbles) as well as a Hero Arts Woodmount (Winter Evergreen) stamp.  The papers are from last year's My Mind's Eye Sleighbells Ring 6x6 pad.  And I used my Kuretake Gansai watercolors to color the images.


After I finished this one, I thought the stamped panel was too stark, so I stitched some strips of paper/vellum on the top and bottom and added a bit of twine.

Similarly, for this next card, I added some glitter paper and vellum.

 This next card is a CASE of this card I made last year, just a little simpler and more mailable.

These last two cards were a little bit more involved.  I stamped the Hero Arts image on a cardstock panel.  The merry is an Ellen Hutson die, and I masked off one of the other EH sentiments to get just the Christmas.  I stitched the vellum to the stamped panel with gold thread and then adhered the sentiment die.  It was looking a little boring, so added a few gold embossed stars.

 



I really liked this design so I ended up making a second one.



So those are my semi-mass produced, less involved, Christmas cards.  I've officially doubled the number of cards I have on hand.  Hopefully I can keep this up!

Have a great weekend!