Holiday Card Hustle, day 2.

Good morning! I’m back again for Day 2 of my Holiday Card Hustle series. Over the next several days, I’m going to show you how to incorporate your beautiful family photos into your holiday cards using your holiday stamping supplies. It’s like a handmade photo card hybrid. I feel like I have so many Christmas card supplies that it makes me feel almost guilty if I don’t put them to use for our family Christmas cards. The card I’m sharing today is one of the simpler cards of the series, really a great one for mass production, and this basic design will probably make up the bulk of the holiday cards that I send out this year.

Like my card yesterday, this card today is a 5×7 instead of a traditional A2 card. I chose to work with this larger canvas because it mats perfectly with a 4×6 photo, as well as giving me some extra space to add embellishment. You want the photo to be the focal point of your holiday card, naturally, so I wanted to make sure that my embellishment didn’t cover up or detract in any way from my kiddos’ cheesy, precious little smiles. 😉

I started by trimming a 5″x7″ panel of Fresh Snow linen card stock from Papertrey Ink. Most people just send out flat photo cards anymore, but this could easily be modified to create a more typical folded card by cutting a 10″x7″ and scoring at the 5″ mark. I trimmed 1/4″ from the edge of my photo so that I could mat it with a 4″x6″ panel of Scarlet Jewel card stock. I wanted to bring out some of the colors in the photo, and I’m glad that I fussed over our outfits so much, because the pretty navy and wine combination looks so nice on a Christmas card!!!

After I had mounted my matted photo to the A7 panel, I added some embellishment. I used the Simple Gift Bow dies with some dark blue shimmer card stock to add a holiday “bow” to the corners, then added a gold glitter die cut Merry Christmas at the bottom of the photo. The gold stands out nicely from, but still coordinates with, the shades of gold in the photo. (You could also use black and white or sepia photos if you wanted to use your own unique color scheme for your holiday cards!)

And that’s all! Because this one involves trimming and die cutting, it’d be a super quick one to mass produce. Just cut and glue together et voila!

I hope you’re enjoying this series. I’ve so enjoyed stretching my creativity to find ways to keep the photos as a focal point and still have an element of being “handmade” in my holiday cards. I hope you’ll come back tomorrow for Day 3 of The Holiday Card Hustle! Have a marvelous Saturday, friends!