It's that time of the year when we make Christmas cards at my children's school...
Every year there is a mad dash to get it done in time, as it will be this year no doubt again. But even though that is the case, I love having these cards each year – not only to send to friends and family, more importantly to keep as memories of each year for us.
A snapshot in time of what the kids loved drawing and how they created their artwork too. Wonky Christmas trees and gifts, colouring outside the lines and first writing attempts.
I now have card designs for every year since Josh was in reception and each one is linked to memories – including our temptation as parents to ‘make the design a bit better’ when the kids were really little, as these were going to be cards that are sent out to the world…! :-)
The thing that has been fun each year, is to get some inspiration for 'card art', to turn what could be tricky pictures to create, into relatively easy things to do, especially if you incorporate using finger, hand or footprints. For me, that had the added bonus of capturing the size difference of their prints over the years (although the cards are not printed to scale).
In case you are like me, and scramble for ideas each year, I’ve put together some of my favourite designs for you here. I can’t claim the original credit, as many of these are things that I found and saved on Pinterest over the years. But it will give you some food for thought to get started on!
One thing to say up front is that with some of these Card design providers there are certain ‘rules’ – so for example with ours, they recommend using strong colours and you can’t have anything stuck to the page, including glitter unfortunately, as the machines they use to print the cards don’t like this.
At our school, the deadline to get your designs in, is always during early October – so if your school does something like this, it will no doubt be the same! If your school doesn’t, but you’d like to create some cards with your children this year, the provider our school uses (and that has been brilliant) is IQ Cards – I am sure they work with families one on one as well. You can get in touch at www.iqcards.co.uk.
This year, I think my children are tending towards more of the 'drawing' type designs - where they have to actually use more of their drawing skills than just use hand or foot prints - so we've had a look and found some more ideas that could work well this year for us. Maybe one or two of these might speak to you, and your children, too.
No matter what you choose to design - or rather your children - I hope you have a lot of fun creating your cards and your family and friends get to enjoy the fruits of your labour in December when they receive them in the post from you.