I’ve been making my cards every year for the past few years and along the way, I’ve picked up a few tips from other fellow card makers that can make the process a lot easier and less stressful for beginners.

Assembly Line
If you’re making more than 10 cards (and aren’t bursting with creativity and spare time), consider an assembly line. Design your cards ahead of time and, like in a restaurant kitchen, prep your “ingredients” ahead of time. Cut and score your cards. Find out how much ribbon each card will need and cut each piece. Stamp, and/or color your image on individual pieces all at once. Then once you have everything ready, start assembling. This can be a great activity for you and your kids (or in my case Jabari).

Buy In Bulk
It’s easy to go to a big box retailer like Michael’s or Hobby Lobby (or even to your local scrapbook store) and pick out a sheet of paper from one of their many paper racks. However, if you’re trying to make 30 cards and one sheet of 8.5 x 11″ paper is $.59, that’ll get expensive. To keep your costs down and save some of that money for holiday gift-giving, buy your paper in packs.

Stampin’ Up offers a rainbow array of paper packs at 24 sheets per pack. Current prices on the pack are $5.50 each which calculates to about $.02 per sheet if you disregard shipping and tax, but I’d check their website to make sure that’s correct. One benefit to using Stampin’ Up card stock that I haven’t seen with any other manufacturer is the ability to buy 1 color in a paper pack. This is great if you’re only making 1 design and need one color as your base card stock. On the other hand, if you’re great friends with your LSS (local scrapbook store), you can probably get him or her to place a special order for you of one or a handful of a particular color at a decent price.

Other manufacturers like American Crafts and Bazzill offer color multi packs. For example, you might receive 25 sheets of one color family (such as varying shades of green from light to dark) but you might only receive 5 sheets of each hue. This can actually work out fine if you plan ahead. For example, if you purchase a Bazzill trio pack (3 colors per pack) that contains 15 sheets of 8.5 x 11″, you could easily make 30 cards total, 6 each of 3 different designs.

Color-Challenged? Use The Right Tools (Or Visit The Right Websites)

Stampin' Up's Color Coach

Like in fashion, when it comes to assembling a card, your card stock, paper, and embellishments don’t necessarily have to match, they just have to “go together,” or in other words, coordinate with each other.

You don’t have to be an expert in color theory to accomplish this. Thankfully there are tools already available that can take the guesswork out of finding the right paper. Bazzill Matchmaker is a great online tool that can help you find Bazzill paper that coordinates with some of your favorite brands of paper such as Crate Paper, 7Gypsies, Basic Grey and more.

Scrapbook.com also released a great tool that allows you to find products by color and even makes coordinating suggestions.

Stampin Up’ has their Color Coach which is basically a color wheel of all of their permanent colors. It offers helpful suggestions for coordinating colors and complementary colors.

Value Packs = Mix & Match
If you want to embellish your cards with patterned paper, try to purchase sheets in value packs rather than per sheet. Value packs and multi-packs offer a variety of sheets of paper from the same collection at an affordable price.

Value patterned paper packs can vary in price from $10-$25 depending on where you purchase them, how much paper is in them, and whether or not they come with additional embellishments such as die cuts, stickers, and alphas. Manufacturers like American Crafts, Basic Grey, SEI, and Me & My Big Ideas offer holiday patterned paper at various retailers like Michael’s and Hobby Lobby. If you go at the right time (like the day after Thanksgiving) you can often purchase these packs at huge discounts.

The added value of coordinating paper packs is you can often mix and match papers within one style of card. So in case you run out of one sheet, more than likely there’s another sheet in the same pack that can coordinate with your card design.

Put Down The Embossing Gun
Distressing and embossing, while beautiful, is a multi-step process and takes a lot more time an effort than simply cutting and adhering. If you’re a fan of the sanding block, you may decide to completely block out what I’m suggesting which is to severely limit the amount of distressing you do to your cards.

But let’s think about it. You have 50 cards to make and your design requires to not only emboss, but to also color and distress with a sanding block. That’s already 6 steps right there. But what if all you had to do was stamp the image, color it, and then perhaps ink the edges? That’s reduced the amount of steps to about half.

You might argue with me on this one, and ultimately you’re going to do what’s right for you, but if you have dozens of cards to make, you might want to consider this. After all, the point of these tips is to make your card making easier, not harder.

Anyway, hope you found this information helpful. What are your tips for making holiday cards easier and less stressful?