Once upon a Christmas past, I decided to make a Christmas card. I sought the help of my card making mentor, Jackie, and we came up with a simple card. The design produced two cards on a single sheet of card stock with a piece of vellum fit through a cut in the spine of the card. That year I made only two cards.
More recently I decided to revive the design. With only a few small design changes but much more lead time, I was able to produce a larger batch of cards. This still involved laying out the blanks on card stock and printing the vellum on my laser printer. So last year when I was considering making my own card from a new design I decided to purchase a Cricut cutting system.
With a machine to take the burden of cutting off my plate, it was on me to come up with a design. Originally, I really wanted to do a snowflake on one side of the card with a sheet of vellum behind it. While it still may come back in a future card the design I tried had details that got lost in the cutting process. Deciding to change directions I found some vector art of a Christmas ornament. I modified it slightly, hoping to decrease some of the smaller features and thicken some of the connections. As you can see in the pictures below, it still ended up with a lot of fine detail and some fairly thin connections.
Trying with vellum (I just love the stuff AND I have a package and a half left over) I felt that the transparency to the inside of the card was nice when the card was partially open, but less than ideal for when the card is closed. The way it looks when it comes out of the envelope is important to me, so I changed strategies and used some Recollections Shimmer Paper. Having designed the shell and inserts with holes for eyelets, I used an eyelet setter and some silver eyelets in the corners of the front and inside panels.
I think this was a pretty successful first attempt with the Cricut, though in retrospect there are probably a few things I would have done differently. The eyelets were a neat touch, but since they were done on the front and inside of the card they end up stacking and making a pretty sizable bump in the envelope. With weight, I could see the envelope creasing pretty easily and looking messy. Also, finding a good place on the card to add a small mark to show that I made the card is a nice finishing touch, but in this design ended up being somewhat of an afterthought. Some cards had it in gold lettering, some in black, and some I even tried to (mistakingly) use the scoring wheel.
Since pictures are worth a thousand words, I'll include a couple below. Since I am writing this after-the-fact I have to make due with what I have, but hopefully it is enough to see some of the process.