Mom's Christmas Card
by Kathy Berger
I know that Christmas has just passed, but it is my plan to try to do Christmas cards throughout the year this year so I don't get close to Christmas without any cards made, like I did this past year. This card is the ONLY card I managed to make and send.
It is the card I made for my mother. I try to send her a really different and unique card every year. But this year, given that not only had I had another surgery on my ankle (and a far more extensive one besides) but that I fell and broke my leg 3 weeks before Christmas, I was not up for much stamping. It is just too hard to do lying down with my leg up on pillows, and my foot/leg is just too unhappy down for very long. I really have been trying to make sure that I use the "down" time to do things around the house that need to be done.
But I did manage to make this one card. Thanks to FranticStamper's great Precision Dies'
4-up square and
Quad-Sized Square, both from the 1" sets, cutting the window and the frame was so simple!
The flower box on the card front was cut with a Poppystamps die,
Grand Flower Box, also available at FranticStamper. The lovely poinsettias are dimensional stickers I had in my stash, and unfortunately I don't know who made them. The same goes for the other decoration on the front of the card, which is actually two different dimensional stickers, combined.
Inside the card on the window is a valance made with the same flower box die, cut down by 1/4" off the top. The curtains are made of vellum. The small table is an image from my own drawing, as is the Santa in the back "room". The snow globe on the table is another dimensional sticker.
The "wall paper" is Christmas paper from a 12x12 pad. The Christmas tree is from a paint sample, as are the banner pieces and the circles on the stairs. The letters were all punched with an alphabet punch set. The wreath is a scalloped circle with a smaller regular circle punched from its center, with a small bow sticker at the top. There are a lot of products available at
FranticStamper.com that could give you the same look, though.
The stairs were formed by cutting 4 slits in the card-stock and scoring and folding to form pop-outs. Here is a template for the stairs that you can scale to your needs:
The bannister and posts were made by gluing on strips of card-stock and trimming at the card's edge. Here is a photo of the card from the top, to give you a better idea of how the popup for the stairs works:
I hope you have enjoyed my card. Mom did.
Pop-up cards are almost magical to receive, but can be easier to make than you would think. The devil is in the details, like for this card, making sure everything looked good through the window, and making sure that everything fit as I wanted it to, plus cutting the "wallpaper" layer correctly.
I hope that you will give the template a try and share what you come up with!
