How To Design a Christmas Card in 4000 Easy Steps, Part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

OK, there is a part of me that likes the Disembodied Yule Hand card...the same part of me that appreciates The Far Side. I have a few truly disturbed friends who would get the humor and appreciate the card, but Great Aunt Mildred, not so much.

So at this point the Yule Hand card is in the scrap pile. And the scrap pile is beginning to resemble a huge snowdrift bordering on avalanche. The desk has piles of trials and errors, the floor is littered with paper scraps and little snowflakes, and the trashcan is overflowing. And I've got nothing to show for it. Nuthin'.

Is there any way I can salvage any of this? Well, I could revert back to the paper ornament in a nice card. I like the little snowflake punch thingy. I'll make the ornament out of those. It would be on the small side, but with a little bit of string maybe it will work.

Up to this point I've been making the 3D snowflakes using the slice and jam method. There's probably a proper term for this but I don't know it. Slice halfway through the middle of two flakes, flip one, then slide them together. That was enough for the card, but the ornament would need to be meatier. To add two more sides I would have to glue three flakes together. This would entail scoring these little teensy flakes.

Sidenote: In paper engineering, folds must be scored to make them sharp and precise. If the paper is bent in half then mashed down, the fold gets all higgledy-piggledy. You have to use a tool that is thin and sturdy enough to indent the paper fibers without cutting into them. I use an old letter opener. Scoring is especially critical when using cardstock since it is thick and stiff; it doesn't fold well at all.

I managed to get the flakes scored and glued together. Then I spent ten minutes picking out the little fronds with a needle to make it pretty. It was tedious because they kept getting tangled. Here is the result:



Two problems with this. One, it is teensy, only 1/2". It might fall out of the card flattened and the recipient might never see it. Two, NOBODY is going to spend the time to pick it apart and fluff it up. They would just toss it.

Sigh. I got nuthin'

I like the idea of a snowflake ornament, but I don't want to hand-cut a bazillion them then glue 'em together. There is a small school/teacher supply store here that I've never visited. I know by word-of-mouth they don't carry traditional scrapbooking crap, but it was worth a try. I haul myself downtown.

The school supply place has no punches whatsoever. The closest thing to die-cuts they carry are bulletin board making kits. The choices were a package of (24) 6" metallic sparkle snowflakes that were pretty gaudy, or a winter scene bulletin board kit that included some small snowflakes. I ended up buying both. Now I have to find somewhere to ditch a 3-foot polar bear and a penguin on ice skates.

Back home I start with the metallic snowflake die-cuts. Using three, I score them down the middle, then glue them back to back to back making a three-pronged ornament.



Three problems with this guy. One, it is too large to go in the card. I should have checked that first thing. Two, it is...well...gaudy. It would be great on a Grade 3 bulletin board, but not here. I tried punching holes in it with a paper punch thinking it would make it lacier looking or something, but it turned out neither lacy nor something. Third, the die-cut is not symmetrical. When the flakes were glued together, the white edges peeped out all over. I tried cutting them off and ran into another problem. Where I twisted the scissors around a curve, it pulled off the metallic stuff and left a big chunk of the supporting white cardstock base showing. This option was not working for me at all. Auf! says Heidi.

On to the polar bear snowflakes. There are two sizes, 2.5" and 3.5". I score and fold three big ones to make a mock-up. I don't glue them because I might need to use them again later. There aren't very many of the big ones. Result:



I can tell right away I'll have the same problem with these as I did with the metallic ones. The die-cut is not symmetrical. You can see the white backing peeking out on the lower left edge.

Not a problem. I can scan these, print, rough cut, score, fold, crease, glue, then cut around them so everything is even. (Yes, there is a reason I repeat all the steps every time.)

I like the big ones so I put six on the copy machine. Crap, managed to cut one of 'em off. That's OK, there are three I can use for a prototype. Cut, score, fold, crease, and glue together.

Problem: The graphic is not symmetrical. One arm is a little higher or lower than the opposing arm. If I cut perfectly around the graphic on one side, the graphic on the other side has parts lopped off and looks tacky.



I ponder on this awhile and decide to search the Internet for a nice, clean GIF. I found only one I liked. Pulled it into Paint and fidgeted around with it a while, added some color, printed it and decided I didn't like it. I'm now stuck again. I really liked the polar bear snowflakes, but how to make them work? They were a freehand looking design; it would be tough to work with.

I had a flash of inspiration. I would scan in one flake, erase one side, then duplicate the remaining side, flip it, then marry the two back together using Paint. The flake wouldn't be symmetrical for all six arms, but it would be symmetrical right and left. As long as I paid attention to the "top" and "bottom" of the flake I could make it work.

I scanned in the little flake this time. I think the larger one is too big. Tried my idea and it worked like a charm. I pulled the image into Word, sized it and duplicated it six times on a page. Printed, rough cut, scored, folded, creased, glued. Then I had to cut around all three sections to get the edges perfect. It looked great! Success!



But there's a problem. It's just laying there like a dead fish on its side. Even though these paper googahs are ornaments, nobody ever puts them on the tree. They are usually lined up on the mantle with the past years' models out there too. It won't look pretty laying up there like chum. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

Since my snowflake was pointy on the bottom, I was perplexed for a while as to what to do. Hummm...if I rotated it a quarter turn, the pointy ends would be facing east and west and two arms would be down as legs. That would work. I thought more sides would look better too, so I tried that as well. Print flakes, rough cut, score, fold, crease, glue. Cut around the four sides. The result:



Well, first off the four sides idea is "Auf". That looks horrible. It needs to be six-sided if anything, and I am NOT going to do all the work that requires. The second yuck is my once charming and delicate snowflake now looks short, squatty and ugly. Big sigh. Back to the original pointy ones. Will have to ponder on that some more.

So I print, rough cut, score, fold, crease, glue and cut out the first two flakes. I need to write "Merry Christmas", "from Speck", and "2007" on the three sides. It needs to be written in blue since the flake is blue. And the pen needs to be superfine point to write in the little circular middle.

Problem: The only thing I own that fine in blue is a Sharpie. Sharpies bleed over time and will ruin a project. (Know your materials!) Since folks tend to drag these googahs out year after year, they need to look nice for a few years anyway. The only other alternative I can think of is a blue ink pen. I hate blue ink pens and so does Hubby. He does end up coming home with one every now and again and they get thrown in the pen drawer. I dig through the pen drawer and find one, and it happens to be ultra fine. Excellent! Problem: I write my little words on the first two flakes and the pen ink somehow cheapens them. They don't look as nice as I had imagined.

Hummm...what to do. Oh! What if I could paste a digital photo in the center instead of the writing? That would be cool. I spent the next 30 minutes going through all my photos and couldn't find one of me that didn't suck. I settled on a so-so one and pulled it into Paint with the snowflake. By the time I reduced it enough to fit in the circle, it had pixelated so badly I was hardly recognizable. That might not have been such a bad thing after all. Anyway, I tried for a while to figure out how to make a circular crop in Paint. I know there is a way, I just haven't been able to find it. I finally abandoned this idea after an hour. Back to the handwriting idea.

Wait a minute! I wrote on the 2005 trees with gels pens. Lemme see if I can find those. Maybe they haven't dried up yet. Woo Hoo! Found them in the bottom of the drawer and there is a blue one with a micro tip. YES! Wrote on the next two with the gel pen and they looked splendiferous.

Problem: (isn't there always???) It was extremely difficult to write on the flake after it had been assembled. Note to self: Write on them before rough cutting. Better yet, write on them before scoring. It's hard to write with a big groove down the center of the surface.

Better yet, score before rough cutting so I can make one big score down the center of the printed page rather than handling six little pieces individually. Hey, I learn as I go along. Process engineering.

I'm humming along making the flakes and my hand starts to cramp from all the outline cutting. (All the rough cuts are done using a paper cutter.) It's not easy to cut through two thickness of cardstock, plus I'm cutting around intricate shapes.

I have an idea! Big round punch! Instead of cutting around the graphic I'll just punch it out in a big circle. There will be lots of white border, but the time savings and hand cramp savings would be phenomenal. I punched out three flakes and glued them together. (Even I am tired of repeating all the steps now. It's exhausting me to type them.) The result:



Two problems with this method. First the punch isn't quite large enough to get all the graphic in the circle. The tips of all six arms got lopped off. I could go back and resize the graphic, but then it would be too small. Second, the plain circle is just plain. The snowflake lost the charm of time-intensive, labor-of-love, handmade craftsmanship. If it loses that, what's the point of doing it? I want my googahs to be special.

Ohhhh. But then I had an ADD moment. I could use the big circle punch and make some neat, but plain, ornaments rather quickly. I drug out the crappy cards again. Since I had purchased three boxes, I had three of every design. I had already designated the Santa ones as photo mailers because they were ugly. But they would be fine for this experiment. Worked like a charm. The result:



The paper clips are just there to make them stand up for the photo. I wanted to show that with precision folding, the ornament would look exactly the same from any viewing angle, even if you were looking straight down one wing. Will remember this technique for future projects.

Back to the snowflakes... I finally figured out a way to get them to stand up. Make a stand. Duh! A little triangular strip of cardstock would work. Problem: It looks like an afterthought and takes away from the finished look of the snowflake. I thought maybe punching a snowflake out on all three sides would work. Nope. To use the snowflake punch I would have to increase the length of the three sides or the punchout would cut the strip in half lengthwise. It would also make the stand too tall and would be out of proportion. I tried using a small punch with a similar shape, but that looked stupid. My stand prototypes:



The problem with all of these is that they are stark white and contrasted too greatly with the soft blue of the snowflake. I'll have to design a strip of some kind that matches the blue of the flake. Off to Paint. I copied five design elements in the flake, cleaned them up a little and set them on a field of soft blue also copied from the flake.

Pulled the image into Word, copy pasted 10-12 times, and printed out a page of strips. Scored the strips, cut them out, folded, creased and glued. Beautiful. Problem: (again???)The little triangles could be easily separated and lost from the snowflake. Easy solution. I'll punch a hole in the top of the flake and run a length of silver cord through it. I'll string the little triangle on the cord and make the cord long enough so that it will reach to the base. Then folks will have the option of hanging it or sitting it on their mantle, and the little stand will never go missing. Great idea!

Problem: If the cord is run through the triangle base, the base will be sitting on the cord making it unstable. Hummm...I think I have this one figured out, but I don't know yet. I haven't gone shopping for the cord. But in the meantime, here is my (semi)finished product.



Yes, I suppose it does look like a schoolchild's holiday project. It looks like it took ten minutes to make, and I guess it actually did. No one will understand when I say it took three days to complete. That's why I included all the detailed steps ad nauseum, in the design process. It might not have been 4,000 steps exactly, but it sure felt close to it.

"Three days????" folks will ask in disbelief. "It took three days to make a paper snowflake???"

"Um, well, first there was this big pink, uh, thing which turned into a Disembodied Yule Hand...then a 3-foot polar bear...and a penguin on ice skates...."

"What...????"

"Uh, nevermind."