Batch "baking"

 I am really getting into the swing of "batch baking" my cards now. (Mum used to say that when she was doing a lot of something straight off). In a bid to up my stack of Christmas cards I made a run of eight (See earlier post), but I realised that wasn't good enough. So now I have really gone to town and made twenty. 

I recently bought a little angel stamp from Flourishes. I was ordering another plate and she just jumped into my basket along with it, so I thought I had better put her to good use. 

I used a Memento black ink pad to stamp her twenty times on a sheet of A4 card, and set this aside to dry thoroughly. Then I dug out one of my favourite backing papers. I've had it for ages, so it is probably from one of my cheap job lots from the QVC seconds shop. I duplicated it and used the colouriser in my graphics program to make it in several pale pastel shades. I then matched these to toning base card, and used copics to colour four angels to match each set. It makes sense to work in fours. Two A4 sheets of card, one A4 sheet of backing paper, and four images, makes four cards. (There are only two each of pink and turquoise because I ran out of ribbons in those colours. Otherwise I might have made twenty four!)

I split the BP and stamped a hero arts script in the gap, embossing this with either gold or silver powder. (I'm afraid this doesn't show very well in the photo). I chose the gold or silver depending on what ribbon I had in each colour. Some had gold threads in them and others had silver. I cut twenty strips of scalloped paper with my Silhouette Cameo machine and edged them again either with gold or silver and laid a strip of coordinating sticky ribbon down the centre of each one. Then it was just a case of layering everything up, and because some of the backing papers didn't stand out from the base card as much as I wanted them to,  I used a fine gold/silver peel off around each section. For a final touch of sparkle I covered all the angel wings with  crystal ice or silver ice stickles.

I printed out twenty inserts with a nice little verse about angels on one side, and an image using a dingbat, and a Bible verse on the other, glued these in place, added a 'handcrafted' sticker to the back and found each one an envelope, and there we have it. A set of twenty Christmas cards made in just a couple of evenings, and that really does make a difference to my tally.