Holiday Cards

I finished our holiday cards the night before we got on a plane for the US. It was important to me to get them done and out since I've been pretty lax in the past few years (not that I haven't had plenty going on, but I've still felt bad). I learned a few things about holiday cards in this process.

1) Finding Christmas cards here is not easy. If you do, they're pretty big and ornate (and likely pop-up) and cost big bucks ($2-$5) for 1 card.

2) Finding New Year cards is much easier, but you still can only buy them in packs of 10-15. These run in the neighborhood of $5 per pack.

3) It's very easy to find blank cards and supplies to stamp, paint, print your own.

4) The stamping, painting supplies are relatively inexpensive for the number of cards you can make.

5) The stamping, painting process looks easy on the back of the package, but is actually pretty time consuming.

I ended up buying a package of 100 blank cards and using about 70 of them. I bought 2 stencils and 2 packs of painting stamper things. The stencils had the same design - 4 chicks. I picked that because there are 4 of us. They are chicks because it was either that or roosters - I'm guessing 2005 is the year of the rooster. Contrary to what some think, they don't say our names. The first two say "Happy" - it apparently takes 2 symbols to do that and that "Happy" only works in front of "New Year". The next two say "New" and "Year" respectively.

The painting things were little pads with paint stuff on them. They were about 1cm in diameter and some were more moist than others. This made for a challenge as some of them you had to beat on the page to get any paint on the card and some you barely had to touch to the paper and you'd get a flood of paint. They're now in the hands of my little sis and hopefully she'll have some fun with them.

The painting process wasn't hard. I made it harder. I decided to do multiple colors on the cards (like the silly sample on the stencil pack). It was pretty quick once you got into the rhythm, but insanely dull. Chrys helped me out so we had cards with 2 color themes. I liked it that way.

Note for next year, though - figure out how to order the neat picture cards that say Happy New Year. Barring that, buy supplies early and start cards early so you don't get overwhelmed. Barring that, just try to get them done before we leave the country, again.