2024 Christmas Cards
Every year I create a new Christmas card design for our family Christmas cards. Upon a time I used to two two different (but linked) designs a year, but who has time for that these days?
This year our cards featured native flowers (eucalyptus eyrthrocorys) and native birds (spotted pardalotes).
Of course, it’s never quite as easy as it sounds. For one thing, my mother insists upon embellished cards. Possibly she’s part magpie, but if there isn’t some shiny gold on there somewhere, she’s not interested. And printing with gold foil is expensive, so every year I get the cards printed and embellish them myself. This means when I design I have to take into account how to embellish the cards with the least amount of product wastage, time and tears.
A few years ago I invested in a Cricut machine to streamline this process, but it’s still a labour of love. This year, unable to find the nice gold Cricut foil I used to use, and indeed struggling to find ANY really shiny, yellow-gold adhesive foil, I took a risk and bought two rolls of Universal Crafts Gold Vinyl. Not without some trepidation, because it was cheap. So very cheap. And I couldn’t find any reviews.
In case anyone else is searching for reviews, I will say that it is indeed very cheap, but after a lot of frustration, I eventually figured out how to get it to work with me, rather than against me.
After testing my cut in paper, I discovered all the joyous ways cheap vinyl can sap one’s will to live. This foil was so tenuously adhered to its backing that the mere act of unrolling it to cut it to fit the mat caused it to buckle and bubble. It was possible to use elbow grease to smooth it out before cutting, but once cut, removing the vinyl from the mat caused all my tidy cuts to shift. Not to mention it jammed my Cricut.
The trick, I found, to working with this vinyl, is to keep it firmly adhered to the Cricut mat after cutting. That meant most of my cuts stayed put, and there were only a few to coax back into place. I then used my transfer tape to pick up the entirety of the rectangle of vinyl that contained the cut-out letters. No weeding on the mat. Pick up the whole lot on the transfer tape, and weed it (by removing the superfluous vinyl) upside down, still on the transfer tape. Then apply the letters to the card. And be wary of any vinyl creeping over the edge of the cutting area after all that polishing flat before cutting - I’d stretched the foil to about 1mm over the cutting area, and that was enough for the feeding wheel to catch it, lift the whole lot off the backing, and snarl it into a sticky mess behind my blade housing.
But it looks good!
The design of the card started way back in 2022, when I attempted to do two birds on a gold branch, struggled with it, and abandoned it - I just didn’t have the time to argue with it, especially once I was asked to switch from traditional Christmas foliage to natives. I went with 5 Gold Rings, based on a sketch I already had, and for 2023 I did 3 French Hens, reusing the same foliage I’d drawn the year previously.
In 2024, however, I popped the discarded concept into the options I presented to my mother, and naturally she chose it (the role of clients in this world being to pick whatever it is that will be trickiest to do).
But, with the benefit of two whole years interval, I decided to simplify everything down, and changed the fiddly gold branch to more solid gold letters. (I then had to ensure that enough of the letters remained visible for the word to be easily read) As you can see from my original rough, I simplified things down even further once I started the final, so that I had easier graphic shapes to cut around, rather than fiddly eucalyptus flowers.
