Tis the most wonderful time of the year

13th Dec - Homemade Christmas Cards

This idea came about when I was thinking about Theia sending her first Christmas cards. Personally, I LOVE Christmas cards. I love sending them. I love receiving them. Let’s face it they are way better than bank statements and junk mail.

And they are relatively straight forward to do and great fun on a weekend afternoon with the kids – or baby.

This year we made a few designs with our fingers, hands and feet – or more specifically Theia’s fingers, hand and feet. All we needed were some:

bright coloured paints
paint brush and sponges to apply said paint
wet wipes
card - A5 card folded in half
felt-tip pens.

We made:

Mistletoes – we used Theia’s feet and painted them green… a little tongue and cheek, but extremely cute.
Santa Claus – we painted our fingers white for his beard and our palms pink for his face. We then used our fingers, painted red, to make Santa’s hat. Little fingers are perfect for his blue eyes.
Rudolph – we painted our hands brown and used our finger as the antlers, then used our thumb print for his red nose.
Christmas light – we painted each finger a different colour and dotted out finger prints across the page. Then we join them up using a black felt-tip pen for the wire. (we could have used leftover ribbon or string glued into place for the wire if we had any lying around.)
Robins – again we painted our hands and fingers brown, using our fingers as the wings.
Christmas wreaths – lots of finger prints in different shades of green, sprinkles with the odd ref one for holly berries – baby fingers make great holly berries.

For all the finer detail, we used a black felt-tip pen – like the robin’s beak, or Santa’s nose and smile…

Pinterest is a great place for inspiration and it has definitely helped in getting the creative juices going. Other quirky little ideas include:

Glitter designs – draw out the pattern or wording you want using a glue pen or paintbrush and then sprinkle the glitter over it. Let it dry for a moment and then shake/tap the excess off. If you do it in stages, you can add multiple colours. Think festive glittery green Christmas tree with robin red baubles, or colourful sparkly stockings.
Get creative with felt. Just cut the shapes you want out using a pair of scissors and then glue into place on the card – voilà.
Use up left over buttons (or buy a colourful jar). These are great as baubles and wreaths, but you can do just about any design just glue them into place and add a few ribbons as bows.

I actually can’t wait until next year to try out some more designs. These might not be for everyone, but they are for us. My mum and mother-in-law are going to love them.