Weddingbee Blog

Once our save the dates were done, it was time to package them up. We’d decided to send them out with our Christmas cards. It saves a little bit of postage, and it’s a little like a Christmas present! Is it too self-centered to think that other people might view an invite to our wedding as a present? I, for some crazy reason, decided to make the Christmas cards. Here is what they ended up looking like:

Argyle makes us both happy, and I was doubly happy that I got to use my favourite apple green in the cards, too. To start, I put on some holiday music. (I’m a geek for it. Especially BTO’s Taking Care of Christmas. They spoofed their own song!)

I used blank white cards from Michaels—the kind that aren’t even folded yet (but they do have a crease). I just wanted the pattern on the front, so I taped two pieces of paper together to make a mask that would cover up the back and prevent me from stamping onto my craft mat. The craft mat could take it, but I was going to be doing so many, I didn’t want that ink to smudge onto the clean cards if I wasn’t careful.

I used the scrap paper that I’d used to test colours to line up these stamps.

Here’s my little setup with a blank card inserted under the paper on the left. If you’re wondering why I didn’t fold them, thus hiding the back from the evil inky stamp, I tried that, and it stamped funny around the fold because it was a teeny bit thicker.

The stamps I used were the A Little Argyle set from Paper Trey Ink. I could go on and on about the awesomeness of PTI, so I might save that for another post. My perfect green was Colorbox’s Moss Green pigment ink. I inked up the larger of the two argyle strips with that.

Then I stamped it on the card. I ignored the patchiness of the ink for the time being. Because of the size of the card I had, I had to do four passes with the stamp. In the photo above, the diamonds don’t go all the way to the right-hand edge of the card—it just needs two more diamonds in each row! And I wanted them four diamonds high.

Now that I had all my diamonds in place, it was time to address the ones that were patchy. I wasn’t going for perfection, as they are handmade, but I wanted a bit more coverage from the colour in all the diamonds. That’s where the single diamond that PTI includes in the set comes in:

Ink that baby up, then just line it up over a patchy diamond and stamp away! I love clear stamps because it makes this so easy. Imagine trying to do this with a wood-handled rubber stamp. Practically impossible!

I didn’t re-ink the single diamond after every single stamp, as I didn’t want it to be too obvious that I’d gone over some diamonds.

The red lines were faster because I had a regular-sized red inkpad (not a tiny cat’s eye like the green one!), and I didn’t have to go back with the single-stitched diamond stamp. Large expanses of stamp are harder to ink evenly than a thin design like the stitches.

Then came the sentiment (a Hero Arts stamp), in the same red as the stitches (Colorbox Cranberry).

Then I decided to have fun with the envelopes. This single diamond is bigger than the diamonds on the cards—I love the oversized look of it!

I had meant to get us a pretty address stamp, maybe even a calligraphy one, but Christmas snuck up on me, so I ran our envelopes through our printer to get our return address on them. I think I’ll still order the address stamp for thank you notes and invites and such.

Each envelope got stuffed with a holiday card, a save the date, and our Christmas letter. Some years I write our news in the cards, but we’re sending out more than normal because we’re combining them with save the dates, so I was in full support of Cinnamon Buns writing the Christmas letter.

I got into stamping in a big way last year because I decided to make holiday cards that year, too. Now my stamp collection is threatening to take over the office!

Do you make your holiday cards?