Tuesday Tutorial: Holiday Cards in a Snap

Happy Tuesday, everyone! Vivian here with this week’s tutorial. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a million balls in the air right now. Any regular day finds me trying to squeeze it all in and when December hits the added holiday events and obligations make squeezing it all in next to impossible. I find I’m always behind in December!

I decided this year to come up with a couple of quick holiday card designs that I can turn to in a pinch (like when it’s fifteen minutes before we have to leave for a holiday event or 10:00 at night before the last day of school in December and I haven’t put anything together for my kids’ teachers or…you get the idea).

I created Card #1 for Hanukkah using the Farmhouse line, but this design could be easily replicated for Christmas or New Year’s or any other holiday by swapping out the papers and the greeting:

Happy Hanukkah Card How-to:

1. Cut a 3.75” X 5” piece of cream cardstock.
2. Print greeting (or write greeting) on a Little Flyer or scrap of patterned paper. (If I had made this as a Christmas card I could have just grabbed a pre-printed greeting from one of the following Holiday Style products: Word Stickers, Little Flyers, or the Flower Sack.)
3. Adhere greeting to left edge of cream cardstock about 1/2" up from the bottom.
4. Machine stitch around the cream rectangle twice – once with a (relatively) straight line and once with a wavy line. I can stitch a card like this in a minute or two because I don’t care how messy it is. This detail can also be added with a pen if you don’t sew or if you want to make this step even quicker.
5. Cut a 5.5” X 8.5” piece of black cardstock and fold it in half to form the card base.
6. Adhere stitched cream cardstock rectangle to card base.
7. Punch three circles from patterned paper.
8. (Optional): Adhere punched circles to metal-rimmed tags. (I happened to have some tags lying around and thought this added a bit of fun holiday sparkle to the card.)
9. Adhere circles to card.

Card #2 was created for Christmas using Holiday Style, but this design can also be easily adapted by forming a different shape with buttons (a heart, a star, etc.):

Noel Card How–to:

1. Cut a 3.75” X 5” piece of black cardstock.
2. Adhere 10 small buttons to the black cardstock to form a tree.
3. Adhere a greeting (here I used a Flower Sack element but you could also use a sticker or a greeting printed on patterned paper or cardstock) below the button tree.
4. Tie baker’s twine from the Wrap Pack around the bottom of the card and trim ends.
5. Cut a 5.5 X 8.5” piece of cardstock and fold in half to form a card base.
6. Cut a 4.25” X 5.5” piece of patterned paper.
7. Adhere patterned paper to card base.
8. Using dimensional adhesive (pop dots, foam squares, etc.), adhere black cardstock to center of patterned paper on card.

Hope these card designs prove helpful to you, whether you're crunched for time or not! If you create cards based on these designs, please post them to our October Afternoon Flickr pool - we'd love to see your work!