Making Christmas Cards

Reba got me thinking about Christmas Cards. I've been making my own Christmas Cards since the mid 1960's, and it has been a wonderful way to send a personal holiday greeting to all of our friends. I started out by making silkscreen prints, but gave up on that method finally: the solvents were very bad to work with, increasingly hard to get, and the water-based alternatives didn't work as well for the prints I was making. Since I'm a biologist and botanist, all my cards have been related to plants with some holiday connection; thus I needed a method that would present the color and detail of the subject well. The mistletoe, done in colored pencil, was the image for last year's card. The clubmoss, Cattleya orchid, and red maple are images from Christmases past.

Now I use either colored pencil or watercolor to make the images for my cards; then I photograph or scan the artwork and then use a high quality color printer to make giclee prints on card stock. I order the cardstock (and matching envelopes) from a supplier of high quality paper.

Here are a few images used on past Christmas Cards:

I was inspired to start making cards by a friend of my husband's parents named Oley Speaks, a composer and songwriter who every year composed a Christmas Carol, printed the music, and sent it as a card to his friends. I can remember thinking that this was one of the nicest things someone could do: give something of themselves to others at the holiday season.