This year we are not only making all of our Xmas presents ourselves, we are also making our own cards, an activity that the kids had enjoyed quite a bit. I’ve bought a couple of “make your own card kits” and one has worked definitely better than the other one, so I thought I’d write about them.
amazoncards.jpgI first got the Make Your Own Holiday Cards ($9) kit from Amazon.com. The kit comes with 10 blank cards and a collection of punch outs in random shapes, that you can use to create holiday scenes. Of course, you have to be creative to figure out how to turn the shapes into images, and I was disappointed that there were very few samples provided. The kids had some fun doing it, but the results weren’t fantastic. Plus I felt somewhat ripped off as you could achieve the same results for $2 by buying a package of blank cards and a pad of colored construction paper from the dollar store – just cut random shapes from the paper and look at the product picture for inspiration.
otcards.jpgI was much happier with the Cool Christmas Card Sticker Scenes set from Oriental Trading. For one, they don’t seem to be cancer-producing 🙂 (see previous post for reference), but for another the 12 blank cards come with TONS of stickers which you can put together to make many, many scenes. And the results look nicer than with the other kit. There are more stickers than you can use with the 12 cards, so you can use the rest with cards from the dollar tree.
The one thing that I wish I’d gotten are stickers/cut-outs with Holiday phrases to put inside the cards. Mika has written some very original holiday wishes/poems in some, but her handwriting is not the neatest. Still, we had fun 🙂