Christmas 2016 GIft Two: Home Made Christmas Cards

First a disclaimer.  I do not own the following images.  I drew inspiration from images that already existed, so no copyright to said images is implied or stated.

So, this next gift is a gift for my mother-in-law. 

My mother-in-law actually does quite a bit for me.  She babysits for us when we really need one.  She has given me food storage, permission to pick her raspberries, feeds my husband when he's working around her house and other things.  Normally I give the grandparents pictures of the kids for Christmas, but this year I thought I'd try something a bit more personal. 

So, enter some home made Christmas cards.

My mother-in-law has found that she loves to send cards to people the last four years or so, so I figured this would at least fall into one of her interest categories.

I took some card stock I had around the house that I bought a long while ago and then either drew directly onto the card itself after folding it in half or I would draw on another piece of white card stock thickness paper and then I just adhered it to the front of the card with a glue stick.

I drew the pictures first in pencil, then in black ink (I just used a good ball point pen for that) and then took some good old fashioned crayons and shaded the pictures.  IF I was talented at water color I might have tried to do them a bit fancier, but it has never been one of my specialties.  I'm half decent at oil pastels, but I don't have any, so crayons it was *laugh*.

For inspiration I simply looked up "Vintage Christmas Card Images" on Pinterest and went from there.

Now, if you aren't talented at art, you can still do this type of gift.  Just go and plug in "Vintage Christmas Card Images" into your favorite search engine, find some you like, get a free photo program (I recommend Photoscape as it's the program I use and really like), crop your images down/resize them so they'll fit on a card and then cut out and paste.  Easy Peazy!!!

 I then went into my word processing program and just wrote out some holiday sentiments like, "May the joy of the season find you this Christmas and all through the New Year" and stuff like that in some nice font, printed them out, cut them out and glued them into the cards with a glue stick.

If you like coloring in, you can also look up "Free Christmas Coloring Pages for Adults" and mess with those to fit onto a card too after you color them in.  That might be fun :).

I finished up the gift by including some envelopes I had from a print out card kit I had gotten a while back, wrapped a ribbon around the whole lot and then put a cute stamp for some cute envelope edging if she wants to make the cards fancier.  And tadaaa!  Another gift done.

Total cost to make:  Nothing as I had everything around here to make it.

Total time to make:  Probably about five to six hours total between all the stages of drawing and coloring and everything.