Christmas Card 2012
I know I'm totally late...it being only 5 days before Christmas and all...but my Christmas cards were finally mailed out today. Since our wedding was just over a month ago, we decided to make this year's cards a combination of Christmas and wedding "thank yous." In doing that, we had to send nearly 90! I had to be as thrifty as possible.
In a perfect world, I would have printed these as postcards and written the "thank you" in the space on the back. The budget wasn't going to allow for that, though...neither was the time-constraint. So, I decided to design a collage & printed them as 4x6's at Sam's Club. They printed a lot darker than the actual image, but for the few dollars I spent, I couldn't complain.
Armed with a pack of #10 envelopes, a corner-rounder, a sharpie, and the cutest packaging tape I've ever seen (red chevron, Office Depot) I sat down at my coffee table and got to work.
I don't know if it's just me, but I am obsessed with rounded corners! I punctured all 320 of those corners and nearly blistered my finger... worth it! Looks like an entirely different card once that's completed.
This puncher adds so much "fancy" to a super--super-cheap picture. It's my favorite of all the craft tools I own! I bought mine at a WalMart over a year ago. They are also available from Amazon.
After the corners were rounded (and the 80+ "thank you" notes were written on the backs of each picture...my hand being in pain is quite an understatement), it was time to spruce up the white envelopes with my pretty red tape.
I just estimated every tear of the tape and put a strip down the left-front side of the envelope. I like how it created a candy-cane look to an otherwise plain envelope. The tape was only $4.00 and I was able to add the strip to all 85 envelopes and have a lot left over for other future projects.
Last step to the holiday card madness are stamps, of course! I didn't have time to wait in line for the cute holiday-themed ones, but I found these little gems in the USPS kiosk. I'm a sucker for little black hearts. I think these will be going on any kind of snail mail I ever send in the future. So cute!
All in all, I spent less than $0.75 on each card (including envelopes, tape & stamps). I would have loved to splurge on the folded cards with pretty address labels and silver-lined envelopes, but when you're sending out 85 cards, a few sacrifices have to be made. I love how my thrifty cards turned out. Good enough for a fridge, am I right?
Our photos came from a recent shoot we had with one of my favorite Dallas photographers, Kelly Christine Photo {she's an East Texan-gone-Dallas, like me. What, what!} I've been admiring her work for over a year now and I was so glad I finally got the chance to book her for myself.
You guys all need to follow along as Kelly blogs about her photo shoots, films, illustrations and daily life. There are always plenty of awesome things going on over on her blog :) Thank you Kelly! As always, very beautiful work.
Hope you all got your holiday cards in the mail a lot sooner than I did! If not, use some of my thrifty tips and take a few hours to address them, then race to the post office before the looming "delivery-after-Christmas" deadline. Good luck!
