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The Beauty of Handmade Christmas Cards

The Beauty of Handmade Christmas Cards

Colourful Christmas Trees and a Carol Singer Themed Handmade Christmas Card Design by Parade Handmade

There is an elusive fuzzy warm feeling around Christmas and all that is Christmas if you allow yourself to distill it from all of the cynicism that abounds. Humans gravitate toward happy fuzzy warmth in order to balance some of the harsh realities of life.

These days with social media internet, radio and television, every bit of news about the whole world and all the suffering that entails, is blasted at us from all sides. We are overwhelmed and/or saturated by all we are expected to process, care about, respond to, believe and achieve. This overload is beyond our natural reach and beyond our capabilities to give energy. We need to nurture ourselves and those around us and reach out somewhat beyond that too.

Warm Greetings and Cute Things

Warm greetings and cute things that remind us of warmth and special moments are essential and form part of our emotional landscape. Handmade cards and indeed handmade things do this for me. They encapsulate all that is good. Creativity, hard work and good intent. There is an authenticity to it. A value you can't replicate with mass produced products. A freshness. An immediacy not comparable with anything else.

They say it is good to support small local business. Indeed it is. It is good to support anyone who puts their heart and soul into creating through whatever means they have available to them. Our creativity is priceless. Our heartfelt expression and workmanship is important and it is wonderful to celebrate it even in the face of adversity, huge competition, unfairness and wobbly economies. It is worth it because we are worth it and we deserve to find and to share a little solace and a little happiness even as the world spirals in this way and that in ways we don't fully understand or have any control over.

The Subject of Handmade Christmas cards

Colourful Baubles Handmade Christmas Card by Parade Handmade

And so to the subject of handmade Christmas cards and Christmas card packs. I love to create a fresh batch of cards every year and add them to the remaining cards from the previous years. Eventually we will have a very interesting pile to choose from.

It is difficult and takes a bit of discipline and searching to settle on a theme and style each year. It is tricky to get yourself thinking and designing unique Christmas cards in July but once you get the crank going the cogs start whirring and it is just like any other creative project.. you can't stop coming up with ideas.

Then comes the discipline. Deciding on the few you will bring to fruition and which ones will be shelved maybe never to be made. Then on to the making.

We Need to Choose a Good Theme

This year we have our theme chosen. I love it and look forward to developing it. It will include cat Christmas cards and dog Christmas cards because we love animals and our lives have been touched beautifully by these animals.

I want to have some cat Christmas card packs and some dog Christmas card packs though packs are difficult when you do handmade due to the time restriction and you don't want to create super expensive packs either. So usually our handmade Christmas card packs are in threes or fours. This way they are better value than buying individual cards but not too expensive either for the buyer.

I love the thought of painting cards so I am going to use this kind of technique this year. Most likely in water colour or acrylics though I am not averse to mixed media and we do have a little natural eco friendly glitter set aside..
As I mentioned earlier, we have settled on a theme for our handmade Christmas cards this year and now I have to come up with a pleasing repeatable design which can be altered somewhat to make each one unique but that won't take forever to paint. When I do that I will create another blog post about it and that should be pretty soon.. I have been falling asleep at night while laying out my ideas mentally. It's a great time to come up with ideas. That time between waking and sleeping when you can still remember it in the morning. I am concerned I do not have enough imagery for this blog post since I have not started on the designs yet so I have nothing to show really. I will have to keep it as a little surprise for another little while...

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