Have a holly jolly home made Christmas!
This year I actually followed through and made our Christmas cards. I wanted to last year, but work, graduating from college, and getting married got in the way. Not this year. I had time to kill since Josh was gone for a month. Lets start this thing off with the finished product!
I bought blank cards from Hobby Lobby. They were 50 for $10. Can't beat that! I then raided Lowes for paint swatches of the colors I needed for the Christmas Trees. I got the idea from... you guessed it. Pinterest. I needed to make about 20 more and went back to Hobs Lobs, {it's about 30 minutes from our house. sad face.} but they were completely out of this butcher paper brown so I decided to go with white)
This was my inspiration:
But since patterned scrapbook paper is pricey (like redonkulous) and paint swatches are f-r-double-e, I got in stealth mode and hit up my Lowes. It was sad, really. I don't know what I expected to happen, but I felt like a I was shoplifting and became all shady and shifty. Even though they are free. It's heard to shoplift free samples. Anyway, I left Lowes with a purse full of swatches to create these jolly little guys.
Pretty simple, just cut the strips and glued them down with tacky glue (all I have), then covered each batch with wax paper and stacked a book on top so it wouldn't curl. Cutting out the stars took the most time. After it dried, I punched a hole in the star with a large embroidery needle (yarn needle to be exact)
I went to visit my sister the first weekend Josh was gone, and she helped me with the front of the cards. We came up with the idea to stamp something on the background of the front so that when people remove the ornament, there is still something to look at. In the end, the ever-popular chevron pattern won.
We made the stamp from self-adhesive foam and one of those thick acrylic clear-stamp-block. Does that make sense?
Google searched it for you to have a visual. This, but bigger. Source.
My sister Amelia just so happens to be craftier and artsier than me, so she had all sorts of goodies for me to play with. Applying paint to the makeshift stamp with a brush didn't work out so well, and neither did the block printing ink that she had (because it was applied to foam instead of linoleum as is typically used for block printing.)
Rolling a paint-glue mixture with a brayer worked juuust right (Did you read that like Goldilocks? This paint was too thick, and this paint was too thin, but this mixture was juuust right)
The roller is called a brayer. You want a thin layer of paint/glue (it needs some stick to it) and roll it thin enough that you hear a ripping noise. I don't know how else to explain it.
Then I quickly stamped it to the front so the paint wouldn't dry on the foam
And turned it over and rubbed it with a wooden spoon
And peeled it off.
I got this little "Merry Christmas" stamp from the lobby of hobbies, and used a silver ink to get the point across.
How jolly.
After a few hours, I had 50 card fronts, ready for further beautification.
All I did next was use rubber cement to attach the tree ornament to the front, print out the little poem and cut them out with zig zag scissors, and cut slits with an x-acto knife for the corners of the picture to slide into. (Or should I say, "into which the corners of the pictures to slide"? ...Grammar police.)
Assemble, autograph and address.
Our friends Kyle and Courtney were kind enough to snap the pictures for us. The winning shot was taken at Nashville's Centennial Park inside the big and beautifully lit tree. Just for fun, here are some other shots from the night.
Also, There are finally presents under the tree! I used more left over paint swatches to jazz up the plain brown contractor's paper. (Sensing a theme here?) You can get a ginormo roll that could easily last 50 years for $10. It gives you an opportunity to customize and add some pizzaz for each person. And it beats the pants off of that uber-expensive fancy wrapping paper (not that it isn't beautiful and festive, just pricey)
I used a silver sharpie to draw different snowflakes on the blue paint swatches then cut out the first letter of the name of the recipient. On the others I cut big triangles from tri-color samples and made Christmas tree tags. I got a little carried away. (The one on the left reads: to: p-daddy {my dad pete}, heart: j-thug {josh} & h-bomb {haley} 'Cause we gangsta like dat). I still want to make bows for them.
Christmas cheer has also found its way to the mantle. I replaced the fall leaves with leftover ornaments, a snowman, and a little nativity we got as a wedding present.
I wanted to make stockings out of some drop cloth and felt, and perhaps I still will, but I didn't want to have to hand stitch everything.
I still haven't finished making my tree skirt yet, but this is the idea:
I used an old tree skirt to trace the size on the drop cloth (Basically a big circle with a little circle cut out of the middle), used tacky glue to create a seam, then created a ton these rose buds using your basic blog-pinterest-google tutorial, and attached them with, yep, tacky glue. I've got buds on about 3/4ths of the edge. That last fourth will be the end of me.
We head home tomorrow to spend time with our families. It's not Christmas time until you spend massive amounts of time with loved ones.
So from our little family of two, Merry Christmas!
Haley (and Josh)
