A Merry Christmas Card

This is the card I made for my mother for Christmas this year. Given that not only have I had another surgery on my ankle (and a far more extensive one besides) but that I fell and broke my leg 3 weeks ago, I have not been 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 Die Cuts With A View 12x12 pad. The Christmas tree is from a paint sample from Lowes, 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.

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 use and 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. 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!

Die cuts with matching stamps...

This Christmas I want to make a lot of cards that use a little stamped Santa image from a rubber stamp I made several years ago (that's a story for another time) but my hands aren't up to cutting out a lot of images (and that is yet another story!) So I stamped my image once, scanned it, and used the software for my electronic die cut machine (the new Silhoutte Cameo...love it!) to create a cut file.

It cuts perfectly and I can cut a dozen of the Santas from a single 8 1/2" x 11" piece of card stock. SO I cut my Santas that I need for my cards, but then I had a problem of getting my stamped image onto the cut out die-cut correctly.

I came up with a solution that works so well that I wanted to share it; not only does it work great for my die-cut machine cut files, but will also work perfectly for those mechanical die/stamp combinations (and I have some of those, too!)

I created a special cut file for my machine that would cut a single Santa in the center of a quarter sheet of card stock. If using a traditional die I would simply have cut the die in the center of a quarter sheet of card stock. I then used the NEGATIVE of the die-cut (the rest of the quarter sheet AFTER my die was cut and removed from it) for my stamping tool, a simple template.

I used my stamp positioning tool and a piece of acrylic to finish my template.



I used the stamp positioner to stamp my Santa on the corner of the acrylic piece.



Next I aligned the image on the acrylic sheet, centered in the hole of the template, right where I would want to stamp the image.



I then used a pen and marked the template where the corner of the acrylic sheet was so I would know where to position my stamp positioning tool later.



When I want to stamp a Santa, I simply fit my cutout Santa into the hole in my template and position my stamp positioning tool on my marked position.



I then stamp the image as though I were stamping on a whole piece of paper.



When I remove the die cut, it is stamped perfectly every time!



It is as easy as can be to stamp a whole bunch. I will have plenty for my Christmas cards in no time!



I hope this is a trick you can use, too! Until the next time (whenever that may be!)

Smiles,
Kathy