I start the New Year with a post about making your own Christmas cards. I wanted to finish it before the holidays but it was not an achievable goal. I gave up on buying wrapping paper all together this year since it is too much fun to find other wrapping options, and this year we gave up on buying cards as well.

We initially went to the Manchester Craft & Design Centre to buy them but the price was a bit steep for the number of cards we were planning to buy. The other option was to get them from my lovely illustrator friend, Mary. But she decided to inconvenience me by moving back to the States and by the time I noticed them in her pretty Etsy shop it was to late to order and then send them off.

An odd thing has started happening to me the past year. I set off to buy something and then a little voice is poking me saying that maybe I should try to make it myself. This of course does not include stuff like toilet cleaner liquid … although I did find a recipe for making homemade cleaning products :). So even when we were going through the lovely shops, the idea of us making them was taking shape. I tried to not give myself another project to do since there were plenty of other things I was working on. I failed and then off we went to Fred Aldous, a lovely stocked up crafts store to look for plain cards. The plan was to paint them since we had plenty leftover colors.

Ingredients:

• Plain cards
• Brush
• Colors (we used acrylic)
• Calligraphy pen
• Sepia ink

Lessons Learned

I have to learn to sketch. Originally I was trying to sketch with a pencil the outline of the Christmas Tree. It didn’t work out since I was way too self-conscious about my drawing skills and I was over-thinking and over-trying. In my head I had an image of a lovely tree with branches curving up at the tips but then my hand wasn’t reproducing that. The first couple of cards I put the brush on the sketch I did, were definitely not even close to my expectation. I sulked, and then sulked a bit more ….

And then I let go and slightly chunkier smaller trees came to life from my hand, with a bit of body to them. I was happy. Chris got into it as well and he painted his batch. The end result was fun and well worth the effort of yet another little project that turned our living room upside down.

As tempting as it may be to see the end result, it is always a good idea to leave them a day to dry and not touch them too much.

Writing them was again fun since I bought a new calligraphy pen. I need to have more patience to let the ink dry since I always end up messing it up a bit here and there.