Easy Christmas Cards

Twelve darling homemade cards with minimal cost and time, it can't get sweeter than that. Well, add some chocolate covered toffee and it can ^_~ I made these in a few hours and it would have been lots quicker if I knew right away what I was doing. One sheet of pattern paper, 2 sheets each of 2 coordinating colors of CS, and one sheet to stamp on. Add in some simple ribbon and colored safety pins and I'm well on my way to some cute and easy Christmas cards!

Supplies: Paper by Basic Grey; Cardstock, Ink, Twill Ribbon, and Safety Pins by CTMH; Holiday Tags 2008 stamp set by Papertrey Ink; Gold Stardust pen by Sakura

I used mostly scraps for my cards on all three of these batches. The basic design is inspired by some of the many make-n-take cards at my LSS, Pebbles. They have no stamping and usually only have a single brad or eyelet as embellishment. While they are cute they are way more simplistic than I like to give out myself. Template ideas were brewing as I put these together and the scallop punch Jenn sent couldn't have come at a more perfect time. I picked simple traditional colors to work with the trial to easily give off that Christmas feel :D While this batch uses more CS I thought to try the next ones without it to cut down on time and cost. The Christmas tree stamp was stamped first in cranberry then punched out with my 2" circle punch. I then stamped it again in olive, cut out the tree and glued it to my circle. Lastly I colored in the star with my gold stardust pen.

The second batch was a bit easier since I had figured out what I was doing. I simply stamped the circle element in cranberry and then my sentiment of choice in olive for the circle. Because you make 3 cards each of four patterns I decided to use 3 different images so that each card is a little different. Plus it was a lot more fun to stamp out only four of each image instead of twelve of one image.

This was the last batch. I did the same thing as the second batch except this time I went over the berries with my gold stardust pen. These are great if you want to do a quick and sweet batch of cards without spending a ton of time or money. Even with the ribbon I used and the safety pins the cost per card is only .50! If I had made them completely flat without embellishment then it would have only cost me .30 a card :D

Because I was so excited about this I made a template. It's not fancy by any means, lol, but it at least gets the job done! There are 5 pages, all jpeg. You can use any stamp that fits inside a 2" circle for this so don't feel like I made this just for these stamps :D This works great with scraps too! I used different colors for my scallop circles to use up some odd scraps.

Pattern Paper Cutting Guide
Cardstock 1 Cutting Guide
Cardstock 2 Cutting Guide
Neutral White Cutting Guide
Card Guide Template

Cards made following the template will look different than these trial cards that I made. I will make a version that follows the template exactly and post that later this week. The ones that I have posted here were to help me develop an easy template and I used different colored scraps while creating them which is why they will look different ^_~ Thanks for stopping by! I hope this helps someone with this Christmas cards! And have a Happy Tuesday :D