JOLLIETEXTILES

I always make my Christmas cards early and this year is no exception. I send a lot of handmade cards to friends and family so I like to think of an idea that is quick, easy and effective. This time I came across a pack of fifty 4 x 4″ cards that I’d obviously bought somewhere for the bargain price of £1, so I designed the cards accordingly.

First stage was to cut a piece of acrylic felt roughly the size of a patterned stencil I planned to use. On top of this I snipped up some odd bits of net and synthetic sheers.

Over this I placed a similar sized piece of a pretty blue ‘watery’ sheer fabric.

Then I laid on my stencil, dabbing through a mixture of acrylic paint colours. I selected this stencil as the design has a star motif as part of the overall pattern, but lots of repeat pattern stencils would work well for this idea.

This is what it looked like when the stencil was lifted. I made two batches of these so I would have enough motifs for the fifty cards.

When the paint was thoroughly dry I outlined the shapes with my soldering iron – this took a long time, so I wasn’t particularly precise! The next stage was to gently use a heat gun on the soldered felt to distress the top layer just a little and then I sliced up the pieces with my rotary cutter so I was left with the star motifs. Some were squares, some rectangles, I didn’t measure them too accurately.

These pieces were then backed with some contrasting pearly paper and stuck onto the white card blanks.

These Christmas cards are for my personal use but I have some other cards for sale, in a range of designs, available here.