June Christmas cards: Nordic notecards

In looking back over the Christmas cards I've made so far this year, I haven't done a lot of stamping. There's been patterned paper, die cuts, ephemera, and even some watercolor. Well, for my June Christmas cards I decided to combine a couple of those techniques -- die cuts and watercolor -- to create some clean and simple Nordic-themed notecards.

I used the Funky Nordic dies by Tim Holtz (Sizzix) to create these cards. I started by die-cutting all the pieces a few times from watercolor paper. Tip 1: Since most of the images include multiple pieces, and some are very small, I used lids from old yogurt tubs to keep the pieces separated by image. Once I had everything cut out, I started painting them. I wanted the pieces to be bold, so I applied the paint pretty heavily. (I think that tactic came back to bite me because I kept finding red smears on my card bases, as if the color was rubbing off the die cuts. That was frustrating, but I managed to work around or cover up most of them.) Tip 2: For the tiniest pieces, like the little circles on the red flowers, I attached the pieces to a piece of low-tack tape before painting them to hold them in place.

Once all the pieces were painted and glued together, I began grouping them together for different layouts. (I did do an online search for inspiration with the layouts. I often find that helpful the first time I use a new product.) I used Very Vanilla notecards and envelopes from Stampin' Up! for the card bases, and I added a little gold splatter to the upper part of each card front.

I chose a sentiment for each layout from the Tiny Words Christmas stamp set (Simon Says Stamp) and stamped the greeting before gluing on any pieces. Then I added on the die cuts, either using liquid glue or Dimensionals. I added a hemp twine bow to a couple of the designs, but I didn't use any other embellishments because I thought the cards looked good as is.

After making these cards I ended up with a handful of die cuts that I didn't use because they didn't seem very Christmas-y the way I painted them. So I used those on a birthday card, which I'll share tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by!