Last year I ordered our Christmas cards from Minted and I just loved them. Their cardstock & printing quality are the best I’ve ordered and their designs — submitted by designers from all over the world — are amazing. So this year when they asked if I’d be interested in doing a diy project with their cards I was beyond thrilled. And they’d read my mind. Since catching the journaling bug I’ve been obsessed with stamps, punches, tapes, etc and I knew I was going to have to do embellished cards of some sort this year. The only challenge I had was picking which design to go with. Oh, and taking a photo of the kids that wasn’t terrible. I’ll tell you what I’ve discovered the secret to that is for me, not caring so much. Every year I obsess over are they making weird faces, is Phoebe’s hair doing some nutso thing, is everything perfectly in focus. I finally realized no one is looking as closely as I am and to relax! So, yes, picking the design. I favorited so many, love this love one, this watered colored hand lettered one is amazing, I so want to glue tiny red poms on this one, I hope they have this one next year because I adore it, I have a great pic of the kids in elf hats that would be so cute with this design, and I could do this all day**.

Merry Scriptmas won out this year. The script is just lovely and it worked so well with the photo I ended up using. I love how you can move the design elements around on the cards when putting them together. We were able to nestle the greeting right in the center of the tree with the kids on the side and it just came together so nicely.

I’ve been really into sequins lately. After sequining 24 little ornaments for our an advent calendar I got addicted to seeing their sparkle everywhere so I knew I had to sequin some cards. These I just glued on the cards and I love how they look so much. sparkle sparkle!

We send so many cards to friends in town so I figured I could just hand deliver these and the sequins won’t pop off in the mail. For the ones I will be mailing I thought I’d sew the sequins down with beads to the cards. Another thought I just had though was to stamp them with tiny snowflakes. I’d given up on that idea because I couldn’t find any teeny tiny snowflake stamps (or punches or sequins) anywhere but then I realized, looking at the one snowflake stamp I have, that I could cut the stamp and separate the flakes. So I stamped up some cards and I love how they look. More subtle than the sequins but I love some sneaky sparkle too.

Oh, and I was able to round the corners myself this year with my corner rounder. Scrapbooking tools are so awesome.