Christmas from the Netherlands

Welcome to the last day of the theme, Christmas Around the World at the Card a Day Blog!

Today, we are visiting Holland…  I was trying to think about where to visit with this card, and was browsing the theme of Christmas Around the World and settled on the Netherlands. It seemed to be an easy thing to focus on their Santa Claus (dressed a bit different than North America’s one). But then I also found more tidbits of their traditions, like “Sinterklaas” rides on a horse, and the children leave their clogs out with a bit of hay and carrots in the hopes that they will receive some sweets themselves! Out goes the milk and cookies at my house this year (I really don’t like baking).

I googled for images of Sinterklaas, and came across this png file that was so cute… I also downloaded some free christmas papers here.

I used my Silhouette to help me compose all of the “elements” to make my card.  Here is what I decided to do. If you look at the white dashed lines, that will be the outer edge of my card.  The white strip will be embossed, and Sinterklaas will be cut and adhered with dimensional tape. Prettgie Kerstfeest translates to Merry Christmas in the Netherlands.

Here is how all of my card’s elements are cut out on one sheet of cardstock, for printing and cutting:

I’m off to make my card now, and will be back shortly with the results! Sorry I’m so late this morning… Its 7:40 am Pacific now, and will be an opportunity to show you how quickly a card, once designed, can be done as a print and cut… the best thing is that once you save it, you can do it again, and again, so easily!  I’ll update this post with the card and time in a flash!

Well, the best laid plans of mice and men…. first spent 5 minutes updating some of my post at the Card a Day blog…. Then started my print and cut… everything looked great and then I didn’t set the cut parameters correctly… thought, hey, I’ll try the trick of using a piece of sandpaper to sand the back of the paper so the picture would be able to be taken out (didn’t work, I really had set my cutting parameters wrong!).  So, back again to the printer…. cut again, and everything turned out except the lettering… print and cut again, but this time setting up the white strip that I was going to emboss with the lettering, and forgetting about cutting out the lettering… no embossing for me today!

So, an hour later, after updating the post at the Card a Day blog, here I am, posting the final version of my card.  BTW, the “cord” of the balloon was too small to cut, so I opted to use a felt marker to draw it in… it would have looked cool if I could have found a thin piece of cord or ribbon. Will leave that for another day

And the moral of the story is…. keep trying, and if it doesn’t turn out the way you expect it to, work with what you have, and be happy   Have a great day!