Last Minute Holiday Card

It's Christmas Eve and I'm blogging. What the heck? This year is a repeat of last Christmas Eve. The girls are with Alyssa's dad, celebrating the holiday with her grandparents. Joe's sleeping and working, as he works the entire holiday week. He'll be working tonight, and Christmas night as well. So I'm just hanging out at the house, wrapping a few gifts, making a few last gifts, and watching Christmas movies. So I figured I would pop in here really quick and share a last minute holiday card idea. It's not too late to throw something together, as I just did this yesterday. 

A bit part of the reason that I fail so miserable at sending out Christmas cards is that I don't always have a good photo to use. With the girls being older, I hardly get any photos of them throughout the year to begin with. So I don't usually have photos on hand to pull together for a fun little photo collage or something. And the only time we seem to get a family photo is when we get together for Christmas. There's always seems to be too much going on in life, that we just put off getting a photo taken for a card, and then before you know it, it's just too late.

The girls went to Magic Mountain (a big amusement park a few hours from here) last weekend, and when I saw this photo they took, I knew it would solve my problem. It's not what I might typically use for a Christmas card, but I thought it was a super cute photo and I figured it was a guaranteed way for me to get a card made to send out this year. 

I browsed the designs online at Costco, which is where I normally order my cards, but didn't see anything that I cared for and that would work well with my photo. I've designed my own Christmas cards before, so I knew it would be super easy to do again.

I dug through my kits from Kerri Bradford Designs, looking for designs I could incorporate into my card design. When you purchase Kerri's kits, you get her designs as PNG files as well as the cut files. The PNG files can be used digitally, which gives you more ways to incorporate them into projects. I didn't start out with all of these picked out when I started. But they're all the pieces I ended up with, including the digital stitches and staple that I pulled from my stash of digital kits.

I started with a sentiment from the Merry Everything kit. I actually started with "Merry Christmas", but since I won't even be mailing these out until after Christmas, I decided to go with the "Merry Everything" instead. I just think it's a cute little sentiment.

The PNG's will often be certain colors (or the standard black) once you pull them into Photoshop. But you can easily change them to whatever color you need by using the "color overlay" option. I went with a dark aqua to go with the ornaments on the trees. I also added a little drop shadow to the sentiment.

I thought the dotted overlay from the Magicalness kit would be fun to use over the entire photo. I layered it onto the "background" layer, so that the sentiment was still on the top layer (otherwise, the title would have been covered by the dots).

I didn't want the dots to cover up the girls, so I used the rectangular marquee tool to select any of the dots that I wanted to remove, and simply deleted them.

I also changed the opacity (down to about 82%) so that the dots were a little more subtle.

I knew I wanted to add a little something to the side of the photo, and that I needed to incorporate a little red into the design. I pulled up the red dotted card from the Hello December kit, and selected just a small strip of it to add along the right edge of the photo (I turned the image here, just so that it fit better on the screen). I sized it to fit, and then changed the opacity so that it had a clearer look to it. Kind of gives a washi tape look to it, right?

I pulled up one of my digital zigzag stitches in grey, and added that along the edge of the red dotted paper, to give it a more finished look.

The upper left corner needed a little something, so I pulled up this cute little tag from the Attach It kit and resized it to fit along the edge of the photo. I changed the opacity on the tag as well, just as I did on the overlay and the red dotted paper.

The tag starts out yellow, but I changed it to the same dark aqua color that I made my sentiment. It's easy to make things the same exact colors, when you use the color code # that comes up once you pick your color. You just copy that color code # into the box on your next item, and it uses the same color.

I used the text tool to add a secondary little sentiment and our names. This is the font that just popped up when I started typing, so I just went with it. The fewer decisions I had to make on this, the quicker I got it done.

The little hole in the tag neeed something, so I added two small digital staples.

And ta-da, the finished card. I spent about half an hour on this, and put my order right into Costco. No overthinking on this, and it feels good to know that after a two year break, I can finally sent out some cards again to family and friends. They might not arrive until after New Year's, but that's more than ok with me!

And with that, I want to wish you all a very merry Christmas!  May your time spent with family and friends this Christmas holiday be magical and full of great memories.

Comments

[Mendi Yoshikawa]

This turned out gorgeous and I love that you were able to do it quickly! Merry Christmas! :)

[Gilda]

Love this photo, and how you've made it into a Christmas card! Thanks for all the tips on how you put it together.

[Bev]

I hope your Christmas was Merry. Thanks for that tutorial! I hope to try this out for next year instead of hand making all my cards with silhouette cut outs.

Your girls are beautiful!

[Deneen]

Love, love, love this card :) The girls look so happy!

[Leslie]

Wow - SO cute!! You make it look too easy within a half hour :) Lovin' the polka dots.