Are you also thinking every year, that its a shame to throw away all the nice Christmas cards you received? And then you store them somewhere in a box just to never look at them again!

That’s exactly what happened to me in the last years, but I finally found a great way of keeping all the cards every year and actually looking at them again and using them as decoration for Christmas. I got the idea already early in the year, but I only recently pulled out all my old cards and transformed them in little card books per year. Each booklet got a special cover that shows the year.

I actually found Christmas Cards from almost every year since I am in Australia. Only from 2005 and 2006 I didn’t have anything until I looked into my Christmas scrapbox and found some front parts of cards and one full card with the year 2005 on it. So I believe, that I have dissembled all the cards I got with the idea of re-using the front part of the cards. Of course that never happened.

How to make these books?

Sort the cards you want to put together into one booklet by size. Important is, that the cards should all line up at the bottom. I put the largest cards to the back and the smallest to the front. Based on the size of the majority of the cards I decided where to place the holes. I used a simple office hole-punch. Important, you want to punch all cards with the same distance from the bottom. The first booklet I made at the beginning of the year has the mistake, that I hole-punched each card in the middle, but that means the book doesn’t stand very well as some cards hang in the air etc, that’s why it is important to line them up on the bottom and use the bottom as a guide for punching.

Once done I used 2 rings you normally use for beyond the page projects. I guess you could also use ribbon to collate all the cards into a book.

The cover size was again based on the majority of the sizes of the cards. I left only the largest cards peaking out over the top. I decorated the cover and added the year and I was done. If you want to be very fancy you could add ribbons to the rings.

Now I can pull out the books every year in advent and use them as decoration as well as I can read in them again.

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Thanks for stopping by.

Regine

This post is also available in: German