13 years of handmade Yule cards

[Wulf]

I've been making our own Yule cards for 25 years now, and I gathered up a pile of them to have a look at together. They vary a lot, from stark and plain to rather over-conceptual, but each year has been different and some have been quite nice. My partner Ian and I send out a lot of cards every year - usually 60 to 90 - so they have to be something affordable in both cost and effort. Some years I've had a really great idea and started early; most years I think about it for months and finally come up with something in mid-November. There were a few years where circumstances or creative-malaise got in the way and we had to send commercially-printed cards. Always a disappointment.

Here are a few of the cards. The inside view of each is shown with the front of the card. You can click on the thumbnails for a better look and a few notes about method, content, etc. There are more in the photo stream -- I didn't want to make people scroll down a long posting, but you can browse through them in the photo hosting pool. Let me know if this doesn't work for viewing - I'm just trying this out.

[Juliska]

these are very, very beautiful! I especially love the idea with the stamps! Unbelievable, that you do 90 cards every year! Your friends are lucky 

[lolaforpresident]

Oooh I love these. You have done a lot of great work. I bet your grinds just love these.

[Wulf]

I liked the stamp one too. It was a lot of fun matching people up with appropriate designs. (We started earlier that year.) And postage stamps are often beautiful little works of art that don't get appreciated much except by collectors.

Eighty or ninety cards is a lot to make, but as the postal rates have climbed over the years (up 20 cents since 1984!) it's the cost of mailing them that I've come to dread!

Wulf

[Juliska]

  Oh, I haven't thought about the costs! But you are right! (Last year I sent a gift to a relative to another country and the costs for the parcel were higher than for the gift)
I was always upset, when I got a stamp that was beautiful, because I didn't know what to do with them - now you gave me a great idea! Thank you!! 

[ceep]

I do close to 100 cards, although I only have to mail about 55.  Not only postage, but printer ink is a killer.  I've been stacking them up as I change them and so far I have FIVE empties--and I still have about 25 cards to print.  Gah!

Since I started in 1989 I have used whatever technology I had at the time...the first few were done on a photocopier!

Carol
Extreme Cards and Papercrafting

Here is the index to my cards:
http://extremecards.blogspot.com/2008/02/extreme-xmas-cards.html

[Wulf]

Oh my, Carol, I'm absolutely in AWE! I thought the first few in your Xmas card blog list were good, and then they just got better and better. When I got to the 1997 wallet, I was stunned! I love the fact that you're putting so much work into elaborate jokes that you probably know many recipients will totally miss. But of course you're not really doing it for them, are you?

Many of these must be a simply insane amount of painstaking work to print, cut and assemble, but I have no trouble understanding why you do it. I used to teach theatre prop building, and one year I got the bright idea of giving the students their marks for each project in the form of a different fake document. It started out simple, with a store receipt, then a doctor's prescription, and a little more elaborate each time until the final project mark for which they each got a lottery ticket that they had to scratch to reveal their "winning" marks. I came across one of them recently and thought "What the heck was I thinking? And when did I have time to do this?"

Thanks so much for sharing these. You've raised the bar for handmade cards, and given me lots of great inspiration!

Wulf

[ceep]

Seriously, yeah, it is all about amusing myself.   

If I think it's funny, it goes in, even if no one will "get" it.  Everything is there for a reason.  Even my own mother doesn't get the joke most of the time.

Carol

[Phizzychick]

These are all wonderful, Wulf! I loved looking through your gallery.

I always make my own cards too, but I wish I had kept a better record of them! I visited my aunt recently and it was funny to see all the cards I'd sent for the past few years all out on one shelf. So lovely that she'd kept them and put them out. I had no idea!

[Wulf]

Thanks, Phizzychick, I'm glad you liked them. And my advice is to ask your aunt to save her card collection for you. I only put together this gallery of cards this summer when I was helping to clear out the apartment of a friend who'd died, and found a cache of our old cards, a couple of which I had completely forgotten about. I realized I'd never really made a point of keeping them, and now didn't even know how many we've sent out over the years. From now on I'm keeping a proper album of them, for my own reference at least.