Christmas birdie

I first saw these Inkadinkadoo stamps at a craft fair and immediately got an idea for Christmas cards. I used pearlescent cards for icy and wintery feeling and stamped the bird and text with black Versafine. My first plan included adding whiffs of blue chalk to the swirls, but all my blues were too dark and it didn't look good so I left it out. I added glitter glue to snowflake centres and swirl ends and glued a clear snowflake button on the largest snowflake.

Father Christmouse

Stamping is a quick way to make lots of cards (at least if you keep it simple), so it fits Christmas cards perfectly. I love the cute Penny Black stamps, so I just had to use this funny little mouse in my Christmas cards.

These were really quick cards to make. I stamped the image with black Versafine on white paper and coloured the image with coloured pencils (and chalk for the shadow underneath). I mounted the image onto a larger piece of blue snowflake vellum, fixed a white snowflake brad on the upper left corner and attached the panel onto a white card blank. To add a bit of festive glimmer, I decorated the brad with a gold peel-off snowflake.

This is where it started: first Christmas cards

I really first got interested in cardmaking around Christmas 2004 when I decided to make Cristmas cards for the first time. I had made few attemps to create cards earlier but, probably due to lack of vision, those attempts had remained somewhat pitiful.


The Christmas cards '04 didn't include much crafting, but then again, they were the first "proper" cards I ever made. And since there were about 20 cards to make, I didn't want to make anything too complicated. I folded black A6 card base to form a cut little cardbase. I chose black – although not a traditional Christmas colour – because it gave the card a nice graphic look, and lined the inside of the card with red paper, to give a bit of festive cheer to the card. The main (and only) embellishment in the card was the painted wooden reindeer figure I attached to the front.


For Christmas 2005 I was ready to try something bit more complicated. I was introduced to 3D decoupage at the craft fair and wanted have a go with it. I decided to make cards using robin themed 3D pictures. To set the red off better, I chose deep green card base. Thinking back, it might not have been the best idea to choose so detailed design, but the cards turned out quite nicely. Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera back then, so I don't have a picture of them.


The Christmas cards for 2006 weren't very successful. I'm not quite sure how I ended up using mere peel-offs, but I'm not satisfied with the result. I coloured the two bigger Christmas baubles, but didn't quite achieve the glazed look I was hoping for. I think using transparent might have yielded better results. I added thin red border with felt-tip and added punched hollies to corners.