Making Christmas Cards

Make Your Own Christmas Cards for All Craft Levels

This is an ongoing tale of my journey into Christmas Card Making 😀.
I’m busy right now preparing crochet work for Christmas Fairs I’m attending, but one of my grandchildren reminded me that I was supposed to help her this year making Christmas cards.

Now, I’ve made Christmas cards years ago at school, but as an adult I’ve stayed well away from this particular craft, because there were so many other things to do in the run up to Christmas.

But this is for a good cause (my granddaughter 😀).

So I began with the basics. I need to find:

• Something we can afford to make.
• Something we can both make without one of us giving up.
• Something which doesn’t take too long (because of reason 2) 😉

Then I searched online.

I found plenty of articles on Making Christmas Cards.
These are very useful links:

Christmas Cards for Children To Make:

14 Christmas Card Ideas Kids Can Make

There’s a Handprint Santa; a Fingerprint Reindeer; Potato Print Snowmen; Cupcake Wrapper Angels; and more.
These are great cardmaking ideas for younger children, but my granddaughter is older and looking for something she can show off to her friends in art class.

Easy Christmas Cards for Older Children And Adults To Make

Childhood 101 has a great idea called: Easy DIY Christmas Card

This uses oversized gemstones and arranges them on a card to look like Christmas baubles, which is a fun idea and suitable for all ages apart from the very tiny.
The card above has been made by Carol Johnson on Pinterest.

But my granddaughter decided that she wanted to make something a little more challenging…

Christmas Printables:

So, I then discovered ‘Christmas Printables‘ – shapes and drawings (particularly vector images) which you can download and print out on card to make a Christmas card.
You can find links to many of them on Pinterest. Just search for Christmas Printables.

But I must warn you that many of the images saved on Pinterest link to pages that have long since moved on. So I moved on too.

Images For Making Christmas Cards:

For those who want to use an image to make Christmas cards, it’s important to download images from a site where the photographers and artists agree to you using their work. I eventually found a site called Pixabay.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Pixabay is a clean, easy to navigate site, with none of the endless pop-ups I had found on the older ‘Christmas Printables’ pages I visited.
And on Pixabay, by searching for ‘Christmas Cards’ and ‘winter snow’, I found some lovely, clear downloadable images, often in several different sizes, so they are ideal for card making.

I have posted a couple of the images I downloaded just to show you. The first one is the picture at the top of this post – a Penguin in the snow by Susan Cipriano. And the second one – the House in the snow, by Noupland, just above – is actually a png image which downloads as a layer, so you can choose your own background for it.
(I downloaded the smallest offered size in both cases because I was sharing them in a blog post – but they all come in larger sizes than these).

You can find plenty more lovely pictures to download for Christmas cards on Pixabay. Here is the link to help you: Pixabay – Snow Winter Category.

Christmas Card Templates:

There are also ‘Christmas Card templates‘.
These usually come in pdf files so are all ready to print.
And I found some lovely Free Printable Christmas Cards at Homemade Gifts Made Easy. Here’s pictures of 2 of the cards I downloaded there.

If you are looking for ready-printable Christmas Cards then I certainly recommend these!

Let’s round up what I have discovered so far…

I have discovered:

• Ideas for cards for young children to make.
• Ideas for Christmas Cards using gemstones, tinsel, etc.
• Christmas Printables (most of which appear to be out of date…).
• Christmas pictures and vector images to print onto cards (and these are great if that’s what you are looking for).
• Christmas Card Templates in pdf form (which are often excellent, but you will need to buy the card to print them out on).

However….

My Granddaughter insists that she wants to make her own Christmas cards, and downloading a full image, or a pdf already-designed card, and printing it out seemed to defeat the object of making Christmas Cards from scratch. So I guess we are starting with basic card stock and working upwards from there.

As we discovered, all of the printable images or template-ready pdfs need card to print out on.
Other designs mentioned above need glue, coloured pens, and various decorations.

So, as we are going to use these things anyway… why not go to the experts on Card Making?
Tomorrow we are visiting Hobbycraft 😀.

The Hobbycraft Christmas Card Making Pages have a huge section of everything you could possibly need for making almost any type of Christmas Card you could think of!

• Card Blanks,
• Christmas Cards from basic colours to decorative kits.
• Christmas Paper,
• Envelopes…

• Ribbon,
• Twine,
• Stickers,

• Card Toppers,
• Stamps,
• Dies,
• Reindeer and Robbin toppers,
• Glitter Decorations,
• Jingle Belles….

And more….

And, looking at the prices on the Hobbycraft Christmas Card Making Pages, they seem very reasonable.

I’m going to let my Granddaughter look around the shop and we will work out our Christmas Card designs from there.
I’m sure she’ll pick out something quite intricate (as Nan will be helping…), but I reckon we’ll cope 😀.