A Christmas Card

It's almost Christmas! The time of year to celebrate the birth of Jesus, Immanuel - God with us! Jesus was the ultimate saver, giver, and healer! I made this card for a woman staying at the Bethany House along with a box of items she might need. So hopefully they will help her in some way, and she will feel the love of Christ.

The only thing I knew I wanted to do for this card was use my manger scene stamp from Hero Arts, so I embossed in gold glitter Zing! embossing powder by American Crafts, which looks even more glittery depending how the light hits it.

The papers were from the 34th Street kit by Studio Calico, including that wonderful piece of gold POW paper. The letters were from the Darling Dear collection also by Studio Calico - and I gotta say, I am a big fan of these! They are small enough to fit on a card or fit a bunch of words on a layout, but they really stand out all on their own!

I hope this holiday season brings you blessings and joy!!

A Christmas Card

I do not make lots of cards to send out at Christmas... not yet anyway. Maybe someday I'll get my act together enough to do this, but until then, my friend Kara was the lucky recipient of this year's only Christmas card I made (so far but probably at all)!

I got the idea and steps for making the tree from this blog entry from BasicGrey. It was more difficult than it looked, but once I realized these 2 things (after a few practice tries on plain paper that are in the garbage now):

1.) How to actually fold the half circle (the folds do not have to come from the top... if that makes sense)
2.) You have to start with a pretty big circle pattern to begin with to get a decent sized tree

HOW-TO:

• I used "Fly a Kite 'Wish' Ribbon" paper by My Mind's Eye and cut out a circle using the "inner" circle in the big circle pattern template from Creative Memories, cutting out a circle with approximately an 8.75" diameter (This made the tree the perfect size for a 5x7" card).
• Cut the circle in half (I folded it as best I could, then trimmed along the fold)
• From here, I recommend folding on a practice sheet, then when I finally got it just right, I used it to know where to fold the real half circle I was going to use by placing the practice over the real one and folding as close to the same folds as I could
• I usually can't stand scrapping in such an inexact way, but knew I could cover the imperfections at the top with a star
• The star is from the Holiday Style Flower Sack by October Afternoon
• The background paper is "All the Trimmings" paper from the 12 days of Christmas collection by My Mind's Eye that came in the latest Studio Calico Brooklyn Flea kit
• The Christmas sentiment is a rub on from KaiserCraft that I randomly found in my stash as I was picking out the background paper!