Thinking ahead ...

Despite all of the lovely sunshine of late, I know that lots of you are already thinking about your Christmas projects because of the items that have been on your orders this weekend!  

I have been creating Christmas projects in preparation for the Autumn workshops for a while now so I thought that I would share this little festive project with you in case you are one of those people who also likes to think ahead and get a head start.

(Don't be offended if you don't start Christmas until much later in the year ... I promise that I won't share any more Christmas projects for a while and we will be back to Summer projects again later this week!)

This project would actually work well for any of you who make Christmas cards to order or who make them in readiness for Craft Fairs that you will be going to later in the year.  

You can see from the first picture that I have created some Nordic style Christmas cards.  These would be great to use/sell individually but as you can see from the second picture they could also be wrapped in a cellophane bag, tied with twine with a label and sold in packs at a Craft Fair or given to someone as a gift who likes to send handmade cards but does not have time to make them!

The Bird Stand Inspire Die from Spellbinders is used to create the cards. I also used the Grand Callibur but of course the Spellbinders dies will work with most machines!

I positioned the die (face down) on my square card so that it sat just above the horizontal center line.  So that the die stays put when it goes through the cutting machine I used a small piece of stencil tape to hold the die down.  NB. Even though the stencil tape is low tack I still pressed the tape onto my hand a couple of times to remove a little more of the tackiness before placing it on the front of the card.

As I had positioned my die face down on top of the card I reversed the order of my cutting board and base plate (i.e. cutting board underneath and base plate on top).  This way I was sure that I would cut into the correct board rather than damaging my grey base plate.

Once you have cut the Bird Stand out set the card aside and cut a square of patterned festive paper approximately 1cm smaller than the size of your card e.g. my card was 14.5cm x 14.5cm so my patterned paper was cut 13.5cm x 13.5cm.  I used papers from the lovely City Sidewalks range from Pink Paislee.

Once you have cut the patterned paper, open your card, take a glue pen and add glue all around your design (remember this is on the inside of the card).  Stick the patterned paper to the inside front side of the card (you will need to also use double sided tape on the outside edges of the paper so that the whole of the sheet is adhered to the card).  As the patterned paper was cut slightly smaller than the card it will sit neatly inside the card with a small border all the way around!

 The City Sidewalks paper pack has enough coordinating papers so that you can create a whole collection of designs!

The 'Happy Christmas' sentiment was taken from a Woodware stamp set, 'Snow is Falling'.  I choose it as I think that it gives a particularly clean and simple finish to the card designs.  

I stamped the sentiment onto strips of card stock and then adhered these to the bottom of the design but this would have worked just as well if I had stamped the sentiment directly onto the card.

The final look is really quite simple and elegant.  You could also make matching gift tags which would work well!

The cards don't actually take that long to make and so would work well as a design if you are making cards to sell or give away as gifts or if you just have lots of friends and a large Christmas card list!