’Tis the Season for Custom Christmas Cards & Holiday Gifts

Are you in that crazed and dazed stage of the holidays where you are about to attack your shopping list, prepare the turkey, get the house decorated to impress everyone you know and then, oh yeah, squeeze in that holiday family photo session AND order your cards? I can relate to the big flurry of tasks and sleepless hours ahead, my friends. So as a girl who always likes to help her friends out, I have partnered with Minted.com to make the holidays just a tad bit easier for each of you...and honestly, me too! Yes, you may know that I have designed many a Christmas card, invite, etc. myself, but I was searching for a way to offer more awesome options for my family, friends, design and photography customers and found it here. So check out my new CWD SHOP, the place for fantastic and fun custom photo products, cards and more!  Click on the image below to check it out.

You will find great, customizable cards for Christmas, Hannukah and all of the other holidays of the year. This can be your shop for birthday invites, moving notices, birth announcements and other great life celebrations. Here is just one of the trendy new designs they have, ready for you to customize with your family’s name and photo...

Three EASY WAYS you can order cards & other photo products:

1. My Cheri Wenger Design Photography customers can select up to 3 images from their photo session. Fee is $15 for upload service. ( I am waving this for all new shoots before Dec. 15th, so book your photo session now!) 321.243.3051. I will add you as a client on my gift shop site and send you an email link to the storefront where you can shop and use the photos from your photo tray to customize the products. As this is a busy photo season, allow some time for me to do this which takes a little while for the high res files to upload. Contact me for pricing if you want more than 3 photo added to your tray. Customize your products and complete your order online. Be sure and let me know what you thought of your shopping experience by emailing me at cheriwenger@gmail.com.

2. DO it YOURSELF cards with YOUR IMAGES - Start at www.cwdshop.minted.com. Use the tabs to select the style you want, photo or product you want to order. There are pet cards, Christmas cards, ornament cards and more! Have fun choosing.  Here is one example of one of the cute ornament cards available. Talk about an extra treat for the recipient!

3. Order First, Upload Later - For those of you who know what design you want, know which photo(s) you want from your customer gallery, you can complete your order, send me the order # and I will upload the photo. Once I submit, you will receive confirmation that your order is complete along with a client proof to review. Pretty easy, huh? Just $15 fee for any previous photo shoots. Any new shoots booked from now until Dec. 15th will receive this free of charge.

Still need to accomplish that family photo shoot?
Book a session today, spaces still available for family mini and full sessions. Call 321.243.3051.

Christmas Clip Art makes Holiday Card Creating a Snap!

For years I have spent endless hours stamping lovely Christmas cards to send our friends and family. Even when I get an early start to the process, it seems that I am lucky to get them in the mail the week before Christmas. My husband always asks why we don't just do like everyone else and get photo cards made and “be done with it,”  but it is hard for him to understand the dreaded workings of a creative mind. Not to mention the thrill of accomplishing something beautiful that you can take ownership of! Well, this year, I may just have found my compromise...designing our own photo card. With two fun,  new Christmas sets of clip art, I have already designed a couple potential cards. And to fill my stamping void, I may save that for making some amazing handcrafted gifts. See what you think of these ideas. I am also including a couple that are non-photo cards.

These are ideas crafted using clip art from my 
Simply Christmas Set!

Here are some samples created from The More the Merrier set:

And some inspiration from my latest set, Mod Trimmings!

(I am working on some hybrid samples, combining digital & traditional 

cardmaking techniques, so be sure to check back for more ideas inspired by this set!)

Hope you have gotten your daily dose of inspiration to get those Christmas projects under way.

Right now, I have 40% off on all my digital designs, from Nov. 16 - midnight on the 19th. Gobble up these sets to make your holiday card creations easier than ever!

Day 3- An Elegant Holiday Trifold Card

This is definitely not one of those cards that falls into the annual Christmas Card category, however, if you are looking to send a special card to a family member or friend with a special Christmas portrait, this is an elegant & impressive choice. Pictured you will see the outside, inside fold, total open view of the inside and the back view with the decorative band closure. It was done using some old Inque Boutique stamp sets with gold embossing and some hand cutting. I used Glue Arts Glue Ring Adhesive throughout, gold brads & red glitter as accent along with some crystal effects from Stampin’ Up!® to get the glitter to be 3-D on the poinsettias. Hope this inspires you to think creatively with your stamps and papers. Banded strips are always an excellent choice to hold multi-fold cards closed. The photo inside is an older one of Dan and I with our girls when we still lived in Shawnee, Kansas.

Day 9 - 80 Degrees, but posting about Snowflakes!

O.K., so this doesn’t seem very fitting. It is about 80 degrees in Florida today and I choose to post these snowflake cards. The only snowflakes I am viewing here are decorative ornaments hung from my window panes. Again, I used my favorite holiday set, Snow Swirled, and the gorgeous snowflakes from this set. I stuck with a winter color scheme of Whisper White, Baja Breeze and silver. I just love the wide grosgrain ribbon in Baja Breeze. I used it to create this faux stylized bow. To make the embossed snowflakes spotlighted, simply cut your strip of white cardstock, stamp the large flake in baja breeze ink, use a circle punch to create the windows, attach to the card front, then emboss the flakes inside the openings. Glue Arts’ ribbon adhesive works great for attaching the ribbon. I also used some micro adhesive squares from their product line to attach the loop around the ribbons. For the top card, I also used the scallop edge punch from Stampin’ Up!®. See my new tip of the month posting (in the side bar) for evenly spacing the circle openings!

Day 12 - Never to Late for Christmas Cards!

Each year I vow to start my cards in August, but I never can seem to get into the Christmas mindset in the middle of summer. This hasn’t gotten any better since we moved to Florida. In fact, getting into the Christmas state of mind takes some real convincing until the reality of Thanksgiving sets in. This year I am being good to myself and have decided to not design a nightmare card that has me up all hours. Here is a peek at our card for this year. I went back to the traditional red and green color scheme with a twist, using the In Color Kiwi Kiss from Stampin’ Up!® with my favorite bright red cardstock, Real Red and the silky smooth Whisper White. I just loved the beautiful swirly tree from the Snow Swirled stamp set embossed in White on the red — it really pops! I will later post a cool poinsettia project using this same combination! So keep checking back on the blog for that project.

Other tools and supplies used: Kiwi Kiss/Very Vanilla Satin Ribbon, Stampin’ Dimensionals, So Swirly wheel, Stampin’ Around jumbo handle, jumbo cartridge with Versamark ink refill, heat tool, white eyelets, Color Spritzer tool, Old Olive Marker and Kiwi Kiss Classic Ink. Adhesive: Glue Arts Glue Glider Pro and the easy-to-use cartridges make large cardmaking projects like this a breeze! They are easy to switch from temporary to permanent adhesive and you don’t have to fiddle with reloading new adhesive when you run out. Just pop in a new cartridge!

Hot Tip: For even spacing on the eyelets, I used the double circle punch from Stampin’ Up!

This is a really fast way to make sure the two eyelets are properly aligned on top of one another. Next use the Crop-A-Dile for quick and easy setting prior to mounting the red panel on card front.

Day 16- Time to Shellabrate the Season!

Living in a coastal climate, I always love creative ways to make Christmas cards that fit that bring a touch of Florida into the design. In these two card examples that I demonstrated at my November Stampin’ Up!® workshop, I 

used the Sanded background stamp with a shell stamp from the Seaside set to create this simple and elegant card. The verse is appropriately from the Shellebrate stamp set which I used for the Surfin’ Snowman pull-up card. Tomorrow I will post another set of cards made with that cute set.

To recreate this:  Cut a piece of Naturals Ivory CS to 3-3/4" x 5". Stamp shell in versamark ink and use Gold Stampin’ emboss powder & heat tool to emboss the shell image. Ink Sanded background stamp with Versamark pad and colorize using chalk Stampin’ pastels in natural tones of mustard, cocoa, chocolate, carmel, moss and rust, or add others you like! The sponge daubers work great for this! Punch 1/16" hole in top right corner and insert mini gold brad. Mount layer onto More Mustard Cardstock. Tie chocolate chip taffeta ribbon around front panel and trim points. On a small scrap of chocolate chip cardstock, emboss verse in gold, tear bottom edge, drag over versamark pad and emboss edging in gold for a gilded effect. Bend top left corner down. Mount onto card front. Note: In the second card sample, I added some more colored pastels to the background, made a bow with ribbon, added embossing around edges of shell layer and adding more tearing to the verse. You can always use the same basic concept, change out ink colors, papers, ribbons, backgrounds to get a variety of looks, not only on this example, but on any project. Tip: The reason I embossed the shell first in gold was to avoid the gold embossing powder sticking to the versamark ink used with the pastels. So whenever you want to add embossing to a chalked background or stamped card, you have to plan to do the embossing first, unless you don't mind having some touches of embosssing in your background.

If you want to see the Stampin' Up! sets that will be retiring, click here to view. Order by Dec. 23rd and receive 10% off plus FREE shipping!!! You can order these directly from my website. They will no longer be available after Jan. 18th.