This afternoon has been quite fruitful--I knocked out a bunch of cards and am pleased with the results. They are pretty simple, but I really don't think a holiday card is required to be too complicated. My thought is that the right colors (red, green, gold for sure) are needed, and something sparkly to catch the light so that you notice it up on the mantle over the fire, or in the hanging card holder by the door, or wherever you put your cards.
The backgrounds I made myself, although not the way I originally intended to do! Thursday night I made up a packet of gelatin, following the instructions to simply substitute water for the fruit juice called for on the packet. I must have done something wrong because I think there was too much water--at any rate, when I pulled it out of the fridge Friday morning, it hadn't set. I tried to use it anyway but it was just a horrible mess. Undaunted, I switched to doing credit card backgrounds as mentioned in an earlier post. I used a mixture of different paints--Lumiere for the gold, some Folk Art craft paints, and some Golden fluid acrylics. Boy could I tell the difference! The Folk Art seems to suck up all the light and is quite dull. For my purposes it turned out all right because it was a good foil for the metallic paint and accents, but definitely not thrilled about it.
The glitter along the edge of the painted panel (acrylic paper pad) is Stickles; it's not yet dry in the photo. Gotta love Stickles! Luckily from years past I have a large assortment and was able to find the right mixture for each card (I used Holly, Candy Cane, Gold, and Xmas Red).From the picture of everything I did today, you can see I also got a few gift tags made. Tomorrow I will cut some tags from Xmas paper to fit in the little bags, and then they will go on wrapped packages under the tree with the "To/From" info on the tag inside the bag.
