Christmas Cards

Despite having been saying for months that I should get cracking on some Christmas cards, I hadn't made any until this week. I needed some to send to the Caring Hearts Card Drive. People make Christmas cards and then write or stamp a message inside and sign with their name and town. These are then distributed to people in aged care homes who may not otherwise receive a card. The people who organise this have been doing so for 10 years now, and our Craft Group took part last year. Unfortunately nobody was available to make any this year, so I decided I'd contribute some anyway.

To make it easier, I made the first batch using the Night Before Christmas Memories & More Card Pack. This pack contains 54 cards (6 each of nine designs - each double-sided) and whilst they aren't all suited to card making, I was able to use 3 designs to make 18 cards.

The smaller M&M cards are 4" x 3" and can be used as is. The larger size (Santa) is 6" x 4" and needed to be trimmed a little to fit on a C5 card (i.e. an A4 sheet of cardstock cut in half). But it wasn't a big deal and they turned out pretty well, I thought. I stamped some sentiments on the background mat for the smaller M&M cards, using the Itty Bitty Christmas Cling Stamp Set.

Would you believe that the mats for  both of these cards are Old Olive cardstock? The tree card base and the colour on the tree M&M card is actually Crushed Curry. It shows up more true to colour in the group photo.

I will keep some of these for myself and send some to Caring Hearts. I wanted to make some more (I was on a roll!) so I dragged out a now-retired M&M Card Pack called Santa's Workshop. This pack only had two of each different design (but still a lot of cards) so I was able to get a little more variety into them. Also, I was able to use some larger ones as mats for the smaller ones. I think they look pretty good (if I do say so myself).

Of course, the original purpose for Memories & More Card Packs is for scrapbooking, in particular, pocket scrapbooking. I keep planning to make pages and take lots of photos and keep lots of things like tickets to put in them, but I never seem to get the time to do it. Mind you, I did a whole album for my brother and his wife last year for Christmas/birthdays. They had a great trip to Europe and Lenny posted daily write-ups and photos, so I used the write-ups for the journalling and used selected photos in the album. I thought it turned out pretty well. I used the Best Route M&M Card Pack and DSP for this (these are also now retired, sorry!). The album is a Basic Black 6" x 8" Album and I used two or three packs of Variety Pack 6" x 8" Photo Pockets inside. Here are a sample of the pages, there are 40 double-sided pages in all.

Anyway, that's all from me for now. If you haven't already, time to get started on making your Christmas cards!

Happy crafting.