christmas cards

Inspired by the bookmarks I've been mulling over some christmas card ideas. I really like mixing fabric with card, it has a bit more texture than just using card and paper. Having said that I'd like these cards to have a bit more texture. I am going to try very lightly padding the tree next time.

quick valentine

Not that this in any way reflects my feelings, just that I was very short of time and he was about to leave work!

I wanted a simple shape that I could use as a background and as the main part of the card. I also wanted to play with new spiro spline tool in Inkscape. The tool lets you make nice curves that are easy to work with and make smoother curves than the beizer tool.

First open an A4 landscaped document and make a simple outline of a rose with the pencil tool using spine set to ellipse. This gives a nice thick/thin curved line. I tweaked the lines a little by editing the nodes. Position the rose roughly where you want it on the page, the A4 page will folded in half to make the card.


Make a new layer below the black line. Draw basic shapes using the pen tool and tweak the nodes to make shapes that deliberately go slightly outside the black lines. Then fill the shapes with a gradient. For the stem copy the black stem, fill it with the green gradient you made for the leaves and off set it slightly.


Make a new layer above the black lines. Group all the black outlines and copy them to the new layer. Arrange them across the rest of the page with some bleeding off the edge. I knew that I wanted to print the outlines on red card, select them all and make them the darker red of the gradient.


By turning the layers on and off, print the coloured layer and outlines on a textured cream card and the background only on the red card. So the red outlines to bleed off the card you'll need to trim the card slightly as printers doesn't print right up to the edge.


Cut the cream card to fit, put some foam tabs on the back so it will be raised and finish it with some ribbon.

tagging

We took our decorations down early to get some decorating done, so I thought it was time to make the Christmas cards into tags for next year. I really enjoyed using last years home made tags.

It is really nice to reuse cards and not just put them into the recycling. It is also a nice process, as Corrina said, it's great to take time and to get into the detail of the cards. You don't need to use the whole picture, maybe just the words or a part of the pattern. And you don't need to stick to squares either. I have great oval cutter that is just the right size, but you could make round tags by drawing around a jar and because a jar is see through it will be easy to position where you want.

The other thing you can do to jazz them up a bit is use scissors that cut patterns, I have some that cut a scalloped edge and some that make a ziz zag. You can normally pick them up cheap in the kids section of craft shops or stationers. You don't even have to use them on all of the edges, I made some long thin tags and did the zig zag on just one short end.

If you are punching holes into them for ribbon remember to leave room when you are cutting them out! I leave the ribbon until I come to wrap the presents, I never know what colour to use until nearer the time.