Anyone making their own Christmas Cards?

[Jen in Chicago]

I am all about MASS production since I will need 100+ cards. Last year (pre-baby) I made postcards with snowflakes on them for the holiday season (inexpensive to make and send, and you don't have to write much). This year I need to make cards since I must send a picture of the little one. I made his birth annoucements and Thank You's.

I just bought some stamps at a Stampin Up party that I may use.

Anyone else making cards? What are you doing?

Here is my criteria:
1 Inexpensive (if you need tips and hints as to where I have bought supplies let me know, I try to be thrifty)
2 Fits in an "invitation" envelope (I can get them at Walmart for cheap)- 1/2 of a piece of cardstock folded over
3 I would prefer to use my white cardstock as the base, but could go by a ream of something else ($12 at an office supply store around here.)
4 Easy to make a lot at once, I am not into the "tiny details"

I thought of using Judes's hand and decorating it like a Christmas Tree (put a gold star at the top of his middle finger). Using his feet would be easier (like I did for Halloween) since I can catch them easily while he plays in the exersaucer. I have been using hand and foot prints for all-occassion cards for a while now.

[vpalmer]

Generally I like to consider myself to be fairly crafty, but I cheat when it comes to Christmas cards and make them on Shutterfly. I design our Christmas cards for work (I'm in Marketing) so you would think I would do the same for home but Shutterfly makes it SO easy. We did DD's birth announcements and they even mail them to the recipients for you at no extra charge. You can even upload your Outlook address book for the contacts. It is a huge time saver and that gives me extra time to work on DD's scrapbooks.

Sorry I was not more help!

Veronica
Mom to Eva 6-12-03

[megulis]

I don't know if this is legal, but I get animated gifs from Yahoo! Greetings or Bluemountain. I just get the pics and paste them into Word, and format the documents for a large index card. I give credit to whatever the title, by whom, and where I got the images from.

[SeekerMage]

I bet that if you played around with it you could make something cute with his foot print. like a santa head....toes would be the beard...just add a santa hat and some eyes and nose? hehehe you could be cheesy and put his feet prints and some snowflakes and write walking in a winterwonderland hehehehe

ok its late and Im not thinking clearly....since you are sending a picture what about making a picture frame type card....perhaps even cutting out a small window, perhaps a circle large enough to see his little face and then making that the center of a large snowflake, or the head of a snowman....etc etc. Or just color copy a whole bunch of pictures of his face and use that to make a snowman....or use family pictures of the faces to use as ornaments....round balls with your picture in the middle, you could make it like they are hanging on a tree branch or just in a line across the card.

If you are creative at all, which you seem to be, I like the hand tree idea....try making some prints of his feet and then playing around with possible designs....maybe a tree would work...or a reigndeer....a weird sort of snowman etc. sounds like fun....I will be organized one of these days to do this again!

Oh....another idea is try taking a cute picture of him in a holiday outfit, or dressed up as something like a snowman, or in a santa hat....color copy the picture and paste that to the card and add some stamped extras. We did this with Angelas halloween picture last year...she was tinkerbell and we got a cute picture of her holding her hands up by her face with her eyes closed looking very angelic....we made copies of the pic (.50 on a color copier that made 4 prints per page in 3 by 5 size or up to eight or twelve per page depenging on the size wanted)....I glued the picture to the card and then added silver stars and or snowflakes in a border around the picture and card...they were sooo cute and made the perfect xmas card! I wish I had one to post and another picture and time to do it again this year!

Heck...you could just dip Judes feet in red and green paint, one color each foot and let him do abstract art and stamp away on each card....feet overlapping, not organized etc....add some glitter to the wet paint and there you go! Just have fun...if you have a lot to do make it fun and simple...good luck~

[houseof3boys]

Kathryn thanks for the great ideas. I am not a crafty sort but these might inspire me!

[C99]

I'm making our holiday cards this year, too. I don't need to make as many -- only 60 or so, but I was also inspired by some rubber stamps and need to include a photo. I'm not sure what I am going to do, since the photos we're including were pretty pricy. I was going to do waxed-vellum over the photo, but I want people to keep the photo itself and I don't know if the design will encourage that, so I may do a waxed-vellum over a photocopy of the photo (or photocopy the photo directly onto the vellum).

[esianoyam3]

If you can download the picture onto your computer and it looks good in black and white, you can make a card on the computer using the baby's picture... Then you can type a holiday message on the card and print it in mass amounts.