midnight + ice

Hey! Thank you all so much for your wonderful comments about the custom holiday card I made for Allison and Dan and our holiday home tour!! I haven't had a chance to visit everyone individually and thank them (or check out that many of the 1,000 homes that are on tour with the Nester), so I sincerely apologize...but hopefully slowly and surely I'll get there.

So, wow! Only a few days until Christmas!!! I can't wait. But still got a lot to get done before then. What about you, guys? Are you ready? I finished up writing out our Christmas cards today, so thought I'd share them with you. And since they were totally DIY, I'm hooking up with Roeshel's DIY Show Off Holiday Highlights Head on over to the DIY Show Off to check out tons of DIY holiday projects:)

***Updated 12/22/09: And now its Tuesday, which means its DIY Day over at Kimba's A Soft Place to Land. I'm going to link up to that party too, if no one minds:)





Like Allison and Dan, Paul and I don't do the photo holiday cards since we don't have any kids. Some years I splurge on letterpress Christmas cards from Paper Source. Some years I make my own. This year I decided to go green and not spend any money (except on stamps, of course!) by using paper I already had left over from invitation projects.

The deciding factor on what color and size direction I would head in was dictated by how many of the same envelopes I had lying around. I found enough long (9 1/4" x 4 1/8") soft blue envelopes to make it through my list. This meant I would be making a tea-length card, or a very tall and skinny or short and wide card...with some shade of blue in it as I like my envelopes to coordinate with the card. Then I found some leftover dark blue cardstock and figured that a monochromatic blue color scheme could make a slightly untraditional but still very wintery and festive Christmas palette. Here's what we ended up with:



When we send cards we like to write out a personal message to each family or friend. So this year I decided to just incorporate our sentiment into the card (that way I wouldn't have to write it out 45 times)...the whole card became about the text. And you can tell its from us because it has the word "awesome" in it!! Using different fonts and sizes but keeping all the words inside this very tall and skinny invisible rectanglular border, you get a very modern and fun composition.




I left room after "Dear" and "lots of love" so that P and I can still put that personal spin on each card. Here we just hand-write in the names of each of the individuals we're sending them to. And we can sign our names at the bottom with whatever version of ourselves these particular family/friends are familiar with.



For visual interest (all text woulda been pretty boring), I drew some seasonal graphics to fit into a few of the empty spaces. Now I just gotta get the rest of these puppies into the mail!!

Thanks for hosting, Roeshel! And Kimba!!!

Hope you guys enjoy this last week leading up to Christmas...hopefully you'll get some time to relax and savor the season amongst all the last-minute rush. Good luck!!