Quick Christmas Card Solution? Hmmmm

As I said in my last post, I find Christmas cards stressful as you have to make so many. I thought I'd had a fantastic idea when I decided to Google some old fashioned recipes for mince pies, or recipes for mulled wine, print them out nicely and stick them on a card... lazy, I know, but it seemed like a quick card solution.

I decided to go for mulled wine and found a couple of different recipes, for orange spiced wine and a non-alcoholic version of mulled wine. I arranged them in PagePlus, and was about to print them all out and stick them on some small square cards, feeling pleased with myself.

But then I started fretting, thinking what if I send these to people, but they haven't got the ingredients necessary to make the drink? I mean, it's easy enough to get a bottle of wine, but it's annoying to buy a whole jar of nutmeg when you only want 1/4 tsp of it.So I decided to make up some little spice bags, using muslin squares from Lakeland, and then wrapping it in some festive cloth I had been hoarding for a few years... I changed the recipes to say '1 bag of festive spices' instead of listing the individual spices, and printed off labels to fasten to the spice bags, listing the contents.

So my fantastic idea for quick cards ended up being much more time-consuming, but our kitchen smelled lovely while I was making all of the spice bags :)

Here are the recipes:

Here are the spices used:

And here are the finished spice bags:

Merry Christmas!

Christmas cards, of course...

I actually managed to get my cards made and posted before the deadline this year! Must be a first...

Christmas cards are a bit stressful, as you have to make so many. It doesn't help that I always seem to leave it 'til the last minute! I had a go at some small (7.7cm x 7.7cm) cards, to speed up the process. They still seemed to take a while, though! Here are some snaps of them - please excuse the messy desk!

 Sheep & robin digistamps by Cuddly Buddly

 Pear tree digistamp by Pink Petticoat

I also got a new Indigo Blu snowflakes stamp which I had to try out. I embossed the image with clear embossing powder and used ink dusters to add the blue & purple inked background:

Using a plain digi tree and 2 snowflake punches, I made some Christmas Tree cards:

I'm entering this one in the Crafty Creations Challenge: Anything Goes

And finally I thought I'd better use the beautiful trees stamps I borrowed from Crafty Distraction AGES ago (sorry!), so I had a go at some snow scenes:

I'm entering this one in Lexi's Creations challenge: Snow

I'm entering this one in the Allsorts Challenge: Brown/Blue/Aqua


I also couldn't resist making a couple of cards with a festive photo of my beautiful girls, Emily & Darwin: