Friday, December 23, 2016

After my last Christmas craft sale, it was nice to do some crafting for myself and even then it wasn't for me - I made a record number of handmade cards. Somehow I was just super organized instead of being super behind. "Late for this year, early for next" was my motto! I even made 45 flat cards for my co-workers and that's the subject of today's blog.

So, so many bells!
Cardmaking is often not a spontaneous thing. Most of the time people see the end product, not the sketches, colour sampling or model. To figure out how I was going to pull off the flat cards, I had to quickly check and see how many bell shapes would fit on a 12x12" sheet of cardstock so my Pazzles could be a pretty good holiday helper! Then I had to find a rubber stamp sentiment that would fit the space as well as make sure that the bell shape would fit the diagonal line background stamp I had in mind. Oh, and I also had to make sure that I had coordinating ink as well!

I really wanted to impress my co-workers with crisp machine drawn text but ran into a snag halfway through. The old style pen tool for my Pazzles only holds certain size pens and out of the millions of pens and markers hanging around the house, none were really in colours that matched! Half of them were machine drawn anyway, so that was a huge time saver.

Bells were made in every colour. I cut and stamped one sheet a night and soon the pile of bells grew! The night before I gave them out, I fired up Netflix and threaded gold metallic floss through each one. Originally I wanted to string Hershey's kisses on each bell, but that quickly turned into a tangled mess!

If you want to deliver holiday cheer to your co-workers next year, here are the supplies I used for 45ish cards:
  • bell SVG /Pazzles cutting file
  • sentiment stamp from Stampin' Up Christmas Pines set
  • diagonal stripe background stamp from Stampin' Up
  • 8 sheets of 12x12" cardstock in green, red, coral, orange, light blue, grey and pink
  • 4 sheets of letter sized white or vanilla paper (12 sentiments to a page)
  • ink pads in green, red, coral, orange, light blue, grey and pink (I use Stampin' Up because it matches with the paper)
Have fun!