Hello crafty friends. It seems early to be posting Christmas cards on my blog, but with October around the corner, I like to start getting organised.

When it comes to birthday and friendship cards, I think nothing of spending a couple of hours making a very special card for a friend. But Christmas cards are in a different category for me. I make quite a few, so any design I choose has to be repeatable without me losing all of October and my sanity.

I have three cards for you today that use the Winter Trees Stamp set from Paper Rose Studio. These are all inked in different ways, but the basic layout is the same, allowing me to make several of each design at once.

This first card uses four different green inks. I used a MISTI stamping platform so that I could restamp in exactly the same place each time. Starting with the darkest colour at the bottom. I inked roughly a quarter of the design in each colour, overlapping a little, and using a micro fibre cloth to dab the edges so that I could blur the line between colours.

For this particular card, I used these inks from Altenew which all blend with each other, but any coordinating inks would work.

This second card is white heat embossed. The image is stamped in Versamark Ink and then heat embossed in Brutus Munroe’s Alabaster embossing powder. Like the first card, I cut the panel out using a stitched rectangle die, and mounted it onto a white card base.

Finally, for the third card, I used an offset stamping technique to give the impression of both shadows and snow. I first stamped the image in Hero Arts Unicorn White ink. Any white pigment ink will work, but it must be a pigment ink. This opaque ink stays on the surface, giving a white background to the next stamping.

I then moved the stamp just a smidge (very technical measurements, I know!) to the side and up, and restamped in a green ink. If you look at the picture above you can see where the green ink lands directly on the paper giving a shadow, and where the white ink remains, looking like snow.

You may think it’s odd to be making snowy cards using Australian stamps, but although I’m Australian, I’m living in Japan, so we’re currently moving towards winter.

I hope this gets you inspired to get going on Christmas cards, even though it feels ridiculously early, and that I’ve been able to give you some ideas for simple, time effective cardmaking that will work in multiples.

Until next time, may your days feel like Christmas (but more restful!) If you’d like to see more of my cards, I post them all here.

Blessings,