Christmas Card Archive

I cannot tell you how awesome it is to be married to my tech support. The old Mac was located, plugged in and on the network shortly after I requested we try to look for it. Booyah!

So, I went through my old cards and had a good laugh at a few but mostly reminisced and noted my growing skill and changing tastes. Let's take a walk through memory lane, shall we?

2008
The first Christmas that our kidlet doesn't sleep through it and is able to open presents. It must have been the excitement of a kid-oriented Christmas that gave me temporary amnesia and made me think we could get a really good family picture. We took the picture ourselves with a timer on our camera and the outtakes are priceless. We have pics with Dad barely in the shot, the kid melting down, Mom rolling her eyes or giving the stink eye. Many where someone is half way to blinking thereby looking stoned. The only way to keep the kid amused was to cheer which is why the hubs has his mouth wide open. This picture was the best of the lot and not too shabby now that I look back.

I had been doing a lot of Christmas doodles and added them to the foreground. Kind of busy, but very festive.

2007
The only year since 2001 I bought manufactured cards. By the time I needed to get them prepped and mailed out I had just finished the birth announcements and was still trying to figure out my 8 week old baby. 

2006
We're pre-first child, spending our Christmas in our first house and I have oodles of free time. I took a picture with our timer, grunged the picture up a bit and chose a grunge-script font.

2005
One of my favourite cards. I took a picture of us then took my time illustrating the card. I love this illustration style and I think I'm going to do more of it for the next little while.

2004
As I recall I was very, very busy at work and left my card design to the very last minute. I wasn't really feeling the Christmas spirit yet so I took a quick picture of our hands and threw it on with some snowflakes. I do like the combination of red and light blue.

2003
I created a quick and simple illustration of us this year. This was the last year I printed it myself on our home printer. I may have a hardcopy somewhere, but that would take some major excavation to uncover it. Just imagine it being printed on a cream, slightly shiny pearl paper. It sparkled a bit and was very pretty.

2002
This one actually cracks me up a little. I printed it at home and for some reason I thought a really small card was perfect. It was tiny like those itsy, bitsy cards that are attached to gift bags. Somewhere around 3"x3" folded. I have a picture of us taken before we went to a friends wedding that past summer then added illustrations and scans from bits of origami paper. Same batch of stuff I used in my Sketchbook Project.

2001
This one also makes me laugh. It was our first Christmas together and I think it was at the peak of the web cam fad. I took a bunch of web cam pictures of us, made them black and white then printed it on oatmeal coloured kraft paper. Again, a hard copy is kicking around but who knows where. I remember taking gold, sliver and black marker and illustrating twinkling Christmas lights around the card.

It was a lot of fun going through these old cards and remembering the process of each card and design. I'm looking forward to many more years of cards.

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