AD| Getting creative by making our own Christmas cards this year

Christmas this year is going to be a little different to previous years. We may not be able to spend the day with all of our loved ones and we may be facing a ‘trimmed down’ version of Christmas, however, as I wrote in a blog post last week, Christmas is not cancelled!

Just because Christmas is going to look, and most likely feel a little different this year, doesn’t mean that we can’t go the extra mile to make it that extra bit special this year.

There are so many things we can do this year to make 2020 a Christmas to remember. From video calls with family and friends to holding back gifts until later in the day so that it’s not all done and dusted with first thing in the morning.

I also think it’d be a great idea to take lots of photos. You could this on your mobile phone, digital camera or as I like to do with our Instax polaroid camera. I love that I can take a photo and the print will be in my hands seconds later. I like to stick the photos to our fridge with magnets or use small craft pegs to hang them on string above our mirror. I always find with photos taken on a mobile phone that I never end up printing them off!

While I appreciate Christmas isn’t all about the gifts, for children it’s certainly a big part of it, and I feel that this year is most certainly the year where our children deserve a little extra treat so why not spoil them with some homemade treats, hot chocolate and anything else you think they may like.

Christmas Eve

We tend to give our girls a new pair of festive pyjamas to wear to bed on Christmas eve. My husband quite often sneakily buys me a new pair too! We find it certainly helps to get us into the festive spirit! Do you give your children anything on Christmas eve or do you wait until Christmas itself? We also like to sprinkle a little ‘reindeer food’ outside our front door too!

With that being said Christmas can actually be a very expensive time for so many people. That’s why I thought we’d get creative this year by making our very own Christmas cards. Much to my husband’s delight!

Save the environment

Now we like to be as environmentally friendly as possible so if we can use recyclable materials and things that we already have around the house to make our Christmas cards then even better.

Luckily for us I happen to have some plain brown recyclable cards that we can jazz up. Now with all things crafty, I like to get our children involved. we made this into a really fun activity by going on a treasure hunt around the house to see what else we could find that we could use for our Christmas cards.

We found my old letter stamp and ink set, some yarn (which I may add I have a plentiful supply of thanks to learning how to crochet during lockdown), some PVA glue and of course some coloured pencils and felt pens. In addition, I have been working from home for the majority of lockdown so I do have a printer at home. This was particularly handy when it came to printing off some fancy fonts free for our Christmas cards.

We found lots of free fonts online so decided to use these for the front design of our cards and then we used our letter stamps, pencils and felt pens to add messages inside. The free font I used is called ‘Hunter’. It was easy to install by just creating an account, logging in and just downloading it.

We also decorated the front using some stickers and by drawing some fun festive images on too. If you feel you need some inspiration, I always find looking on Pinterest helps. I have so many different boards for all sorts of things. It’s a great, free resource that I use almost on a daily basis to get ideas and inspiration for all sorts of things.

Christmas Cards

You could decide to make all of your cards the same or perhaps you want them all to be different. You could even make each card unique to its recipient. It’s such a lovely way to let someone know that you’re thinking of them. You can even personalise your cards with their name or perhaps a photo or drawing of their pet too!

These are our cards. What do you think?

Have you ever made your own Christmas cards? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.