Holiday Greetings to Friends and Family

Now that the holidays are over, I've come to the realization that I really do need to start working on my Christmas cards much earlier in the year. It took me way too long trying to decide on a design for our card this year so I had a late start and barely finished in time. That left me with almost no time left to do much else creative for the holidays. Such a disappointment since there's always so many neat holiday crafts I wish I had the time to try.

The layout for the card front of our Christmas card this year was inspired by a beautiful card created by Lin,  posted on her Sending Hugs . For our card, I used the Cuttlebug Snowflakes embossing folder to add texture, and snowflakes were cut using Die-namics' Let it Snowflake die.

I loved Lin's idea of using a Polaroid type frame; it was perfect for adding a photo we had taken of our furbaby Latte with our outdoor Christmas lights display in front of our home.The original photo was cropped in Photoshop and placed in a faux Polaroid frame shared by Megan on The Nerd Nest blog. The frame is a free download and Megan includes a tutorial to make it all easy.

On the inside, the card opens to my favorite Pop Up Accordion Panel card.

 Added a photo of us from our Hokkaido vacation on the inside, and tried to keep the embellishing to a minimum with just the snowflakes...but even then assembling 80 of these did take longer than I had expected! Thank goodness hubby helped with much of the scoring and die cutting!

And finally, here's a side view showing the V-fold mechanism that creates the fun pop up movement on this card. There are quite a few tutorials with free templates available on the web for this type of card, just search for "Pop Up Panel Card".