putting the "mental" in ornamental! :)

this fortnight at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ our theme is, "shape up for the holidays" in which we are embarking on any shape of card we'd like to make... except... (you can already see what's coming, right?) except square or rectangular! which means you can make a round card, a card shaped like a gingerbread house, a stocking-shaped card, a reindeer-shaped card, a triangular card that's decorated like a christmas tree; ok, i think you've probably got the idea, lol. you really only need to make ONE card, by the way; but i decided to make a set of cards shaped like ornaments, and somehow i wound up with twelve! here they are now:

ok, yeah, i know what you're thinking; you're thinking, "hey lauren, don't you famously hate to mass-produce cards?!" indeed i do. but i also hate to cut out just one of anything, when i can easily staple two or three layers together and get a lot more bang for my fussy-cutting buck. so when i decided to make four different ornament shapes, i wound up with a dozen ornament bases. and the next thing i knew, i had decorated all of them!

so why would i even want twelve cards that are similar without being the same? well, a couple of years ago i started sending individual cards to each of our nieces and nephews, and it's been a pretty popular idea! if you have more than one kid, i'm sure you'll realize that when embarking on this sort of project, it's important that each child's card be individually theirs; while at the same time making all the cards quite obviously equal. plus, it just makes the job go faster if you streamline the process.

i chose to use all older basic grey papers, since the different lines coordinate so beautifully together. i limited my pool of embellishments to flowers and snowflakes, stacked in the center as decoration for each ornament. i attached them with fairly flat brads so they'd be postal-friendly, too!

my goal was to wind up with a set of cards that would sort of resemble a box of assorted vintage ornaments: where each one is clearly different from the rest, but a member of the same family. i think i did pretty well on that score, if i do say so myself. (and, apparently, i do, lol!)

and now why not drop over at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ to see stephanie's gorgeous creation and start planning your own shapely masterpiece! ♥