Holiday Cards for Caring Hearts

Hey folks!

So this is a little late and I’m behind with a whole LOT of promised posts. But my excuse for you is “its the holidays!” 🙂

I’m here today to talk about a holiday cards event I organized in my office about 2 weeks ago. We would be donating most of the cards we made from the event to Vera’s cardmaking drive though folks could keep their cards if they wished. We ended up with most made cards going to donation, 23 total!

Now the biggest challenge was that most of the folks attending this event were first time crafters. Which meant I couldn’t ask them to bring in any supplies – they didn’t have any 🙂 We also had a time limit so I didn’t want to make the cards too complex for beginners. There was selfish interest in getting my co-workers interested in papercrafting after all!

So I tried to divide up my own supplies into 5 different stations for easy sharing. And kept each card simple but using a technique. This way they were introduced to 5 different techniques and could use some fun papercrafting tools. Each participant also paid for a kit of the “perishables” they would use like cardstock, patterned paper, etc. I put this kit together for everyone.

Oh, and I also used this as an excuse to do a whole lot of personal shopping for new stamp sets! 😛

Wanna see the cards we made? Here goes…

Station 1: Stamping

This one only had inks and stamps to create a simple one-layer card. Here is the card…

This one uses Julie Ebersole’s Bokeh Dots and Merry & Bright sets. The “Christmas” word is from Reverse Confetti Bring on the Merry set.

Station 2: Die-cutting

This station had my Cuttlebug and dies matching the Hero Arts Winter Sparkle stamps. There was a lot of ooh-ing and aah-ing for the bug’s remarkable die-cutting powers! 🙂

Station 3: Stenciling

For this station I had 4 of my distress inks out – Peacock Feathers, Faded Jeans, Seedless Preserves and Tumbled Glass. Also set it up with my craft mat and some washi tape to hold the stencil. The stencil we used was the Hero Arts Swirl Tree stencil.

Station 4: Heat Embossing

This station was setup with my heat gun and white and gold embossing powders. We used the Winnie & Walter Peppermint Zone stamp to create the ornament. I designed and cut out the ornament top on my Cameo for everyone so all they needed to do was dip it in Versamark and emboss the whole top with gold powder. The sentiment is from Winnie & Walter The Big, the Bold and Merry.

Station 5: Shaker Card

For the last and most complex card I gave a little challenge to the group – making a shaker card!

We used Winnie & Walter Winter Woodland for the background and the deer in the foreground. Glad the set has a co-ordinating cutting file! The frame was cut with Lil Inker Designs Stitched Rectangles. The sequins inside (and on all other cards) are Pretty Pink Posh.

Those were the 5 cards each person could make! Some made all and some few but we all had a whole lot of fun!!

Thanks for stopping by folks. Wish you all Happy Holidays. Hope the holiday preparations in your homes are on in full swing now 🙂