My Christmas Cards

Coming up with an idea is often the hardest and most time consuming part of creating cards and at Christmas, when my time is at a premium, I don't have time to sit in my craft room thinking of ideas. Plus there are so many great ideas out there, I actually find great enjoyment in being able to duplicate someone else's ideas. So these are the cards I copied this year and I've included links to the original creators card.   The first three use the same stamp set Stitched Stockings.  I love this set and I was so sad when it retired last year.

This first one is by LeeAnn Greff and was featured in this post.

Next is this card by Linda Aarhus.  I love how it glitters.

This one is by Heidi King.  You can find the original post here.

And this one I found on pinterest.  The stamp set is called Snow Swirled and it's one of my favorites.  The card is by Anne Marie Hile and you can follow the link here.

Christmas card sets

My mother in law asked me to make her 4 sets of 8 cards to give as gifts to some people at church. She asked me back in August, which was a good thing, because I was able to get most of them done before the exhaustion of the first trimester set in and I became completely unproductive. Her only specification was that they be more serious or religious in nature. No snowmen or Santa Claus or penguins or polar bears. That was the only difficult part, as I prefer to make cards that are more light-hearted at Christmas time. But I was really excited to make these cards and I loved how they turned out.

This first one uses a set I borrowed called Come to Bethlehem.  The blue cardstock is spritzed with shimmer paint, then there is a layer of silver waffle paper and then I heat embossed the image in silver. The sparkle looks really cool in real life.  The idea is a conglomeration of several I had seen on the internet.

I CASEd this card directly from Cindy Major.  You can see her original post here.  It uses a set I love called Serene Snowflakes.  I used my Scoring Board to score all the lines along all four sides.  That was the most consuming part.

This is a black and white card that I just love.  I also copied this one exactly, but not I can't find the original post to link you to.  These stamp sets are Snow Swirled and Heard from the Heart.

These next two cards use the same set called The Sounding Joy.  It retired last year, but I borrowed it from my friend.  Again, the ideas were a compilation of others I'd seen on the internet.

Another black and white card with the Come to Bethlehem set.  This image really needs to be embossed so it stands out well.  It looks so nice.

This card looks better in real life. The crumb cake ink doesn't show up very well in this picture. But the satin ribbon is really pretty. The last card is one I've shown on this blog previously. It was a snowflake card. I also made a cute box to carry the cards, but I forgot to take a picture of it. I heard that the cards were well received, which makes me happy. I love doing things like this.