2008 Christmas cards

For the third year in a row, Hope and I created our family Christmas cards which are now in the mail. Hopefully by now most of you on our mailing list have received them but I wanted to take a moment to share the fun process we went through in the creation of this year’s cards.

STARTING WAY BACK IN OCTOBER
At the start of the fall we came up with the idea to screen print our Christmas cards with some of Hope’s art work. We started working on our ideas way back in October in hopes of getting a head start on this project knowing how new I was to the screen printing process. Here Hope was back in October with one of her drawings:

Of course starting in October was merely that, a start. I spent the next two months researching, reading, and learning everything about the screen printing process. I spoke with many designers experienced in screen printing and soaked up every ounce of knowledge about screen printing eager to experience screen printing for the first time. Between October and December Hope drew many more holiday drawings and words. Here’s most of the drawings I saved:

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH SCREEN PRINTING
Once we finally finished up our final designs, I was fortunate to get to spend a few hours at Lure Design to see how they approached the screen printing process. I must extend a huge thanks to Sarah Blacksher for answering my never ending questions a few weeks ago where I saw first hand their process from burning screens, to printing, registration, duplexing, and reclaiming screens. Once I returned home I was eager to get started on printing the cards. My eagerness quickly turned to disappointment as I quickly found out that some of the artwork and handwriting had a bit too much fine detail for the screen mesh I had ordered (approx 150 count). Here’s one of my first screen prints of our cards which was planned to be printed with white an silver ink on brown paper with a light blue interior.

OUR ALTERNATIVE PLAN
Of course, I always have a back up plan, and so printing these traditionally was always the “other” option. It did allow me to use more colors, which some might find more fun. We printed about 100 cards this year and there are two versions. So if you haven’t had an opportunity to see our cards yet, here they are:

Version one:

Version two:

The back of all cards have a picture Hope drew of herself along with her super cool new signature:

The inside of the cards have a drawing Hope made of our family along with everyone’s name:

AND INSIDE THE CARD…
We sent out with most cards photos of the kids, here they are:

MORE THANKS!
Many thanks to all of you who answered questions along the way as I learned about screen printing!

We hope you all enjoy this year’s cards. After this year’s experience with cards, we might just need to get started on next year’s cards in, oh…February. :o)

Merry Christmas everyone!