This year's christmas cards

For the past two years, I've made Christmas cards instead of buying them... generally I like doing it until it comes to the assembly-line stuff (cutting out 400 little squares and putting glitter on them; stamping 180 martini glasses and coloring them in...), but at that point I'm always caught by the sunk cost dilemma... although in the end I am happy that I did the project, so I guess that finishing them is always better than abandoning them...

It's a bizarre characteristic of mine that I enjoy the end result more than the project itself (mom always enjoys the process more), but this year I think I might have found a card project that I do enjoy in addition to the resultant card.

Previously, I've stolen paper from mom's ridiculous stash, but this year, after staring at the racks of paper at Michael's for a long while and not finding anything that flipped my skirt up, I decided I'm going to use all the magazines that are in my recycling bin and old paper grocery bags.

I'm doing a tea-bag folded starburst out of the magazine pages, and then using the grocery bags for the cards & envelopes themselves. The tea-bag folding should be an easy, portable and very soothing project that i can carry around with me and pull out at any time, so maybe this year's card will come with the added bonus of no assembly-line stress.

I feel like I'm going to look a little ridiculous with my hippie, I'm-recycling-for-Christmas cards, but i think that they'll turn out sort of cool anyway, and lately I'm embracing my ridiculousness, so we'll see how this year's batch turns out. I'll definitely post a pic of the finished piece, but for now, you can see my prototype. I used a corporate gifts magazine that was selling petit fours - you can see the little cake layers and the chocolate decorations.