Making Christmas Cards from "freebies"

I bought issue 84 of Cardmaking and Papercraft because I quite liked the look of the “freebie” on the front – a square wad of Chritmassy papers with cute designs.  I’m quite a traditionalist, really, loving the rich red, gold and deep greens of the season, but I realise that not everyone has the same tastes, and these looked quite subtle, so I thought “Why not?” and bought it.

There are three papers of each design comprising three decoupage topper sheets followed by three co-ordinating backing papers.  I thought you might find it interesting to see what I made with just four of the papers, so I'll show you design one a day and you can tell me which you prefer, if any, and why.

I decided to give this cute little mouse an airing first of all - she reminds me that it's almost time to start decorating.  I don't put up a tree any longer, but when Rachel was small we always erected the tree on December 1st so that we had 24 days as a run up to Christmas, then after Christmas day we began the countdown to her birthday which is quite soon afterwards.

This is the backing paper which accompanies her page, the apples echo those she'd decorating the tree with, but the orange seems a little harsh in tone to me, so I decided simply to stick to the decoupage sheet.  I decided to matt her onto a pale green paper to compliment the tree, and this went on to a plain white A6 card blank.  I cut out the greeting and matted that in the same way.

I cut out each of the accompanying pieces and arranged them as you can see, the gifts look good on the floor beside the tree, and you can see I've deliberately overlapped the frame; I used deep foam pads for this.  I used foam pads to stick one of the apples on the tree, one ready for her to pick up at her feet, and the other has rolled away, as round things often do!  The star and candy canes I stuck down with paper glue.

I placed the greeting centrally, overlapping the base of the main matting to break up the design a little more.

I thought the top left looked a little bare, so found some pearly pink "gems" and stuck them down with some red glitter glue for some extra 'oomph'.  I used a little of the same glue to highlight the apples.  I took some gold glitter glue and traced over the garland on the tree and the star.

So there you are, my first card using some of the "freebie" stash.  I'll show you another tomorrow.