Our 2013 Christmas Cards ...

I had such fun making our 2013 Christmas cards! In Australia, most people just send out a store bought pack of greeting cards and write a small message inside but I have always loved the American Tradition of sending yearly cards with pictures of the family on them. There's something so sweet about hanging up pictures of your smiling loved ones and friends faces as part of your holiday decor. As you know we have many amazing American friends and I love to receive the picture cards from their families each year.  So much so, that I have never even thrown out a single one of these cards and instead store them in our Christmas decoration box. It is so fun each year as we begin to decorate, to pull out the old cards and oh and ah over our friends families and see how much their kids have all grown and what has changed! So for the last two years I have added photos to our cards as well.

For this years card I pulled the best of both worlds together with a traditional greeting card AND a family photo. I used this gorgeous (and free!) gingerbread muffin recipe card download from the blog Cook Republic, so I can't take any credit for the gorgeous artwork on the card. But I did add some of my own decoration to it by way of brown kraft cardstock, candy cane twine, a faux instax of us and a small wooden Christmas decoration. I found the Christmas decorations from our local grocery store for only $4 a packet and love that it was an efficient way of sending a little gift to each family along with their card. And the instax frames that I slipped our photo in were from Kmart.

Another of my favourite details of this years card was the button and string closure on the back of each envelope, which we also did on our wedding invites. It looks tricky to put together but it actually so easy and a cute way of adding a little something to a plain envelope. Basically all you need is a circle hole punch (mine was 2cmD), a small hole punch, an eyelet tool, eyelets, string and coloured cardboard. First cut two circles with the circle hole punch out of your coloured cardstock and then with the smaller hole punch punch a hole in the centre for your eyelets to go through (I find it easier to mark the center with a dot before I punch the holes out). Next place the coloured circles onto the back of the envelope where you want them to sit and mark the center of the circles with a pen. Then punch small holes through your envelope. To put it together I place the small piece of string through the top hole, letting the majority hang towards the bottom right of the hole. Place the red cut circle on top of that and then place the eyelet through the center of all layers and press. Repeat these steps (minus the string) on the bottom circle and tada you have the cutest little button string closure to finish off any envelope! Hopefully that all makes sense as I was going to do a tutorial, but I couldn't quite manage to hold the envelope, eyelet tool and camera all at once ;)