CHRISTMAS CARDS

Since getting married, my husband and I have made homemade Christmas cards every year. It is so much fun and we hope that we will be able to carry on this tradition each and every Christmas. One of my favorite parts of putting these together is making stamp collages on the envelopes from old holiday postage. Below are examples of a few envelopes we mailed to ourselves at our old Brooklyn address as well as the Christmas cards from the past three years.





This was our first card. We printed red text on translucent vellum, with a hand cut snowflake in each card. The first scan above shows the front of the card. In person, you can see the snowflake faintly through the vellum, its various cuts and facets playing nicely against the spare and simple text. The next scan above shows the card open. We slipped in little personal notes typed on my (pink!) Lettera 22 on the back of slips of silver wrapping paper (not shown). The 3rd scan above shows the envelope & stamp collage.



This is the second year's card. I made a marker drawing from a photo we took, posing for this image. I think it really captures us well with very few lines. We used the Optima typeface on the card and envelope after seeing it on many '50s Christmas cards. We felt like the card had a mid-century feel. Could it be the Bertoia chair I'm sitting on? The stamp collage was a little different as we used non-Christmas stamps that had a Christmas/winter feel to them.


This is this year's card. I hand printed the red image with a lino cut I made based on this cover of Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales". The text was printed on our laserjet. Unfortunately, I didn't send one to us this year (supplies were limited!), so I don't have an envelope. It was done with another stamp collage and hand-written addresses in thick red marker cursive.