Happy New Year and Our Christmas Card 2011

Happy New Year!! Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday/Christmas/NYE! We certainly did. And it was so nice to have a week off with Paul at home. Between him being around, visiting her cousins and staying with my parents, sister, and brother for a few days, Maura is going to be so sad this week when its back to normal around here (just me and her all day)!

I know its a few days late, but I wanted to share our Christmas card with you guys. I worked with my good friend Holly of For the Love of Letterpress again and I couldn't be happier with how they turned out. Remember our Christmas cards last year that Holly did for us? and Maura's birth announcements?

This year we did things a bit differently...well, because Holly is like 8 months pregnant and due with her first baby in early February (yay! everybody say "playdate"!). So I designed the card and she letterpress printed it for me, then gave it back and I cut and glued the photos on.

{sent in Sage envelopes from Paper Source}

I wanted the card to have a slight vintage feel to it, so I used a combination of fun fonts and added a border that you might find on an old postcard (also helps tie the photograph into the text and make it feel like one thing instead of an add on). I even used a vintage photo filter on the picture of Maura (just slightly) before I sent it off to get printed (uploaded it to the CVS photo website and picked them up in the store closest to me the next day - super easy).


I had been trying since like October to get a good photo of Maura to use for our card and this one was the only semi-decent one where she was sort of looking in the direction of the camera. (Gosh, this girl is super adorable but she WILL NOT look at the camera!) Because she had her winter hat on I decided to run with the whole season/outdoor thing. And since I love nature, and Maura is shaping up to love it too - I'm so thrilled, I worked the silhouette of a pine tree and snowflake into the design.


Didn't Holly do such a fantastic job printing these? Seriously, if you can ever spring for letterpress, it is worth it...everything just looks, and feels, so much better and richer and more lovely with that extra dimension on good paper.


For anyone interested in the process, this is what the final design I sent Holly looked like. Holly then sent away for a plate to be made of my artwork. She mixed up a beautiful soft green ink for me and then printed everything you see here in black in green. (One color letterpress is easier, faster and less expensive than two or more colors - since you have to run the paper through the press an additional time for every color. If you're looking to save money but still do letterpress, sticking with one color is a great budget option.) Once I got the cards back from Holly, I adhered my photo of Maura to that empty spot on the right.


Thank you so much, Holly! We love them:)

Can hardly believe 2012 is here already!! So excited to see what this new year brings! Grateful to be spending it here with you guys.