My 2011 Christmas Card

Every year, my Christmas card is my little labor of Christmas love.  And every year, I promise myself that the next year's card will be a little less labor intensive. And every year, I break that promise. And I am completely okay with it because I love designing and constructing it and I like to think of them as little presents to everyone I send them to.

After last year's vintage circus poster inspired card, I was at a loss for what this year's card would be. And to be perfectly honest, thinking about what the next year's Christmas card  is always rolling around in the back of my mind. By the end of October this year, I had the plan for this year's card set.  There was not a eureka! moment when the idea came to me, just a series of ideas revolving around things I that I consider my hobbies: food photography, recipe writing, graphic design, and cupcakes. Definitely cupcakes.

And all of that came together to produce this card:

An accordion style card with a Candy Cane Crunch Cupcake photo on the front...

...with three recipes inside to create the cupcake, the filling, and the frosting...

...and the requisite sweet greeting.

There were no "This is never going to work!" temper tantrums this year; there were just so many steps required to make this card a reality:

• Coming up with a cupcake recipe. I came up with the recipe by using "What would Buddy the Elf eat? (WWBTEE)" logic. (And that is also how I came up the idea for the Six Days of Christmas Cupcakes.) There were about six recipe failures before I landed on the recipe used in the card.
• Taking the perfect picture for the front. I am by no means a great photographer; I know enough to take some good pictures and to take a lot of really crappy ones. My iPhoto has about 587 pictures of these cupcakes, approximately 6 of which were decent. In the end, I loved this picture most.
• Picking the correct paper colors. I know the staff at Paper Source Bethesda by name purely from the amount of time I spend staring at paper there.
• Heat embossing the titles. All of the red text in the card is heat embossed.  This was quite the process because each piece had to be done immediately after each sheet of sparkly paper came off the printer. But after doing it over and over again, I had it down to a science.
• Creating the accordion. This was actually the most tedious part. But I just blasted some Christmas music and powered through.
• Putting it all together! A one person assembly line!
• The envelopes. The sparkly envelopes match the sparkly paper used in the card. And I curly bracketed the address to match the curly bracketed titles in the cards.

I always love the moment when my card comes together; it is just the best feeling to see my vision come to papery life!  I love this card!

And now to start thinking about next year's card....