Christmas in July

Good morning!

Ardyth here with you with 4 cards using similar layouts and products.

Each year, I make 300 nativity-themed Christmas cards for 2 churches, who give them to their members. I usually make them in sets of about 30. I am always on the look-out for church-appropriate stamp sets and for simple but beautiful designs that are easy to mass produce.

Because my kids go to camp, summer is a great time to get a good start on this project. I pulled out some Christmas and non-Christmas SugarPea Designs goodies and went to town!

For this card, I stamped an ‘artistic’ night sky using Watercolor Brush Strokes and two colours of dark blue ink.  I stamped the sentiment in black and embossed the star with silver embossing powder for a pretty shine. Using a stamp positioner such as a MISTI makes mass producing a card like this a breeze!

For these cards, I used some of the whimsical images from Come Let Us Adore Him, coloured in Copic markers. Colouring is not always ‘mass-production-friendly’, but by cutting out a circle and limiting the area to be coloured (as well as limiting the colours used), it goes by pretty quickly.

Finally, I pulled a fern leaf from Tropic Like it’s Hot and used it as a pine branch. I love the simplicity of this one and I think it would look fantastic on a dark red card base. Repeated, random stamping like this is faster with an acryclic block, but I used my MISTI for the sentiment and star to ensure precise placement.

I hope I’ve been able to give you some useful tips for mass-producing cards – they don’t have to be Christmas cards, but remember, it’s less than 6 months away!