Christmas Cards for Advent Workshop

Yesterday was our annual Hanging of the Greens and Advent Workshop at our church. Now there is no doubt about it. The march toward Christmas has begun.

As part of the Advent workshop the adults worked on assembling Christmas cards that will be taken down to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC for recovering soldiers of the Afghan and Iraqi wars.

I say assembled because I did all the design, stamping, cutting and punching work in advance. I knew that only two of us that would be there had any card making or stamping experience and we had a goal of 100 cards to be made in the allotted two hours of the Advent workshop. These are three of the six designs that we worked on. They all were fairly simple cards. These are my favorite three. I spent most of Saturday afternoon and evening working on preparing the the "kits" for each card. Part of my goal was to not have to purchase any supplies except for adhesive. Everything else came out o my stash. Most though not all of the cardstock used came out o a pile of stuff I have from my pre-SU days.

One new thing I tried with these cards that I am now hooked on is using MS WORD and printing the sentiment directly onto cardstock. This is how I got the "Merry Christmas" the size I wanted it as all my stamps that said this were either too small or a style that didn't work. I've often thought of doing this, but for some reason never actually tried it. Why I don't know it was so easy and I got just what I wanted. I guess it works best when mass producing a particular card so that you don't waste card stock. Now my next challenge to try printing a sentiment inside the card. This won't be as easy because to do that I need to be able to get it placed in the correct spot. If anyone has a hint on how to do this please leave a comment.