Striped Xmas cutouts

This is definitely the simplest Christmas card design this year. I could have made it even simpler by using patterned paper behind the cutout, but apparently there is a limit to how little work I’ll let myself get away with when I’m making cards.

So the backgrounds are made out of offcuts of card cut into narrow strips and reassembled onto other pieces of card with the aid of double-sided adhesive sheets. I’ve used this technique a couple of times before: on some joyful Christmas cards three years ago and a stripy gift card six (six!) years ago.

Although it’s a bit time-consuming and fiddly cutting strips and lining them up neatly, that was not the thing that took me the longest.

Choosing a font for the cutout was.

I hate picking fonts. I love fonts and font designers do wonderful things, but choosing the right one for any project is a nightmare. There’ll be a letter that looks a bit odd, or it looks fine small but really weird two inches tall, or I just get fed up with looking at the word and no font will ever make it look right again.

In order to avoid having to stick the middle of the letter A back in the right place, I started by looking at the stencil-style fonts I had access to, but I wasn’t happy with any of those. Next up, looking for a blocky font with the letters in the right proportion so that they would take up a sensible amount of space on the card front. Eventually I settled on Cricut’s own Agent Q free font and then edited it to cut a narrow gap in the crossbar of the A. At least once that was finally done, actually cutting them out was quick and simple using the Cricut Maker.

I created three different striped cards, one of which — the gold, green and pink — was big enough for two finished cards. The other two were made of shorter pieces of scrap card. One of those basically used up anything that was shiny, metallic or pearlised. The final one was made of pink, silver sandgrain and an iridescent silver which looks every colour other than silver in photographs!

I assembled the cards and then finished them off with a heat-embossed “merry” cut out of black card.