Craft Projects

Four Ways to Use Coloring Pages this Christmas

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Turn your MERRY CHRISTMAS family coloring pages into gift wrap paper - #ZisubuArtiqueColoring is nice to do, but what do you do with your masterpiece when you have filled the page with a rainbow of color? Do you throw the page away? File it in some dark drawer never to be seen again? Keep it visible in the hopes that someone will notice your artistic genius and compliment you? You invested a lot of effort into filling the page with color, so it only seems right to do something creative with your masterpiece. But what?

4 WAYS to USE COLORING PAGES

Here are FOUR ideas that will work for using and/preserving any colored page, but are particularly well suited to Christmas themed paper such as the MERRY CHRISTMAS FAMILY COLORING PAGES from Zisubu Artique. Have fun celebrating the countdown to Christmas with these easy-to-implement ideas.

1 – MAKE TABLE PLACE MATS

Many local office supply stores offer lamination as a service. Take your family’s masterpieces and have them laminated in the heaviest coating your budget will allow. (Don’t forget to ask each family member to sign and date the back of their page before you take the trip to the store. That way, next year when you pull out the placemats for December, you will be able to reminisce together about your masterpieces.) The laminated pages make unusual and festive place mats for your dining table throughout the year, but especially at Christmas.

2 – MAKE CHRISTMAS GIFT WRAP

A letter-sized (or A4) page is just the right size for gift wrapping a tiny gift. If you are giving small items (e.g. plastic gift cards or small candy bars or toys), they can easily be wrapped in a colorful page. Turn the unwrapping session into a fun guessing game, by getting each gift recipient to guess who colored their wrapping paper. If you are only wrapping BIG BOXES this Christmas, consider wrapping the boxes in simple kraft or other monotone paper. Cut the undecorated border away from the colored region of the page. Glue the vibrantly colored part of the page onto each of the six sides of the plain-paper covered big box to produce unusually decorated gift wrap.

3- MAKE A STRING ART GALLERY

Remember those strings strung above the fireplace on which people would hang the Christmas greeting cards they received in the mail? Borrow from that idea and create a string gallery for your family’s Christmas greeting masterpieces. Use colored clothespins to hang the pages from a line, and create a festive “art gallery” in your living room.

4 – CREATE A JUNK JOURNAL

Junk journals (also called dream diaries, keepsake albums, traveler notebook, etc.) are fun books that you can fill with all sorts of ephemera (that’s scrapbook talk for odds and ends that mean something to you e.g. newspaper cuttings, ticket to the first movie you ever watched with your husband-to-be, recipes, quotes you love, dreams you cherish, etc.). You can think of a junk journal as a scrapbook with none of the OCD rules of real scrapbooking. Create a junk journal to document this Christmas countdown and cover your journal with one of colored pages. Use other colored pages to make unusual interior pages for your journal.

COLORING IS AN INVESTMENT

Coloring is good for you, but it is also a time investment. Don’t toss your colored pages in the trash. Invest a couple extra minutes this festive season, and turn your coloring efforts into something useful that will start conversations and bring back memories in years to come.

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Colorizing CHRISTMAS with Ready-to-Color Christmas Greeting Cards

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Colorable Christmas Cards in the Color the Carols BIG COMBO Christmas Gift SetCHRISTMAS IS BUSY

Christmas is coming. Oh, don’t we know it! One look at the calendar got me thinking about our family’s Christmas card list – not an email list, mind you, but an old fashioned list of names and addresses. This paper list brings together people we like to bless with a genuine paper Christmas card. That, in case you don’t know, is the kind of card that required a tree to sacrifice its life, so it’s a special thing.

It is astounding how quickly people ditched this tradition of sending paper cards in lieu of a generic email one-liner sent at the last possible moment. Yes, postage isn’t free (but you could trade one cup of Starbucks coffee this year for quite a few stamps). Yes, some places have unreliable postal services (and perhaps some of your greeting cards may not be delivered, but what is life without a wee bit of risk). No, you don’t have less time in the day than anyone else. Everyone everywhere is BUSY. (If you are not busy most of the time, take a moment to share your secret for extra hours in the day in the comment section below – I know we all need to find more time in the day.) Here is my challenge for you this Christmas: how about embracing a new thought this festive season?

Consider this idea: This year I will spare a few minutes to send a physical greeting card to someone I care about. Is that a crazy idea?

READY-TO-COLOR CHRISTMAS GREETING CARDS

For those creative folk who have a few extra minutes to invest in others, as well as in their own sense of well-being,  ready-to-color greeting cards are ideal. Buying a few packs of ready-to-color cards should definitely go on your “Christmas preparation list”. (Santa could use an efficient “list” person like you on his staff!)

Ready-to-color Christmas cards are a lot like traditional greeting cards. The big difference is that the color in the feature illustration is applied by you, and not by a printing press. You can use paint, markers, or pencils to add color to printed coloring cards. With digital coloring cards, you will use software to fill spaces in the digital card with color, and then you can print your finished work.

NEW CHRISTMAS DESIGNS

Recently, I was busy working on a new range of coloring card designs when a customer approached me to ask for Christmas versions of the cards. I had not initially planned to release any coloring Christmas cards this year, but the customer’s request got me thinking about how Christmas coloring cards could be more than just greeting cards. I imagined how a Christmas card coloring activity could provide hours of fun for families, friends, church groups and more. So I put aside my planned designs for a while, and improvised some Christmas designs for cards. Zisubu Artique now stocks sets of coloring Christmas cards.

PRINT AND COLOR GREETING CARDS

For those who like to do all their crafting from scratch, there are the “print and color” Christmas cards. You simply print the PDF card pages on cardstock – each page has two cards – and you are on your way to making hundreds of Christmas greeting cards (or just a few, if your Christmas list isn’t too long).

Not everyone likes to wrestle with their home printer – I know mine is rather temperamental about processing card stock. (Some days is plays nicely, and others it makes a big mess of the card projects I try to print.) If you don’t want to waste time loading cardstock one page at a time, printing, cutting the cards, going shopping for envelopes, and then FINALLY sitting down to relax with a coloring activity, the “ready to color” Christmas cards are perfect for you. The price of the “ready to color” cards includes all the craft work, so all that is left for you is to open your box of crayons and start coloring.

START A NEW TREND

Start a new trend in your family or business this year. Send Christmas cards that are colored by your family, your friends, or your business’ staff members. Or send an uncolored coloring card with a little note that encourages the recipient to sit back, relax, and enjoy coloring as they count down to Christmas Day.

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Return to the Handwritten Note

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One-of-a-Kind Cards and Envelopes to set your snail mail apart.
Living in the pond is all about not getting eaten #pondlife
What’s a pond without a frog family? #pondlife
Tiny creatures that escape detection by the naked eye are abundant in your backyard pond #pondlife

Life has become so busy that we have all but forgotten the joy of opening a physical envelope containing a letter or card from a loved one. Remember how much fun it was to run to the mailbox when you were knee-high to a grasshopper? Remember how exciting it was to open that birthday card from your grandma or to unfold the crisp pages of the letter (all written in perfect cursive) from that great-great-aunt that you had never actually met in person? Of course, when bills entered your life, some of that joy was translated into “oh no, not another one” – but the pleasure that came from opening and reading a personal, handwritten note could never be entirely erased by the bill collector. Then the bills stopped coming? Did you notice that? Your mailbox became a collection point for glossy print junk mail as e-mail and text messages threatened to make snail mail and voice calls (with real people – not the automated message systems) a thing of the past.

Tired of finding only adverts and other meaningless scraps of paper in your mailbox? Be part of the change. The tide is turning, as people are rediscovering the value of a handwritten note. Communication is about connecting with people, but modern communication takes the personal element out of the connection. Each of us has the power to reintroduce that personal element and add some sunshine to someone’s life. We can choose to invest in our relationships – and no, it doesn’t take nearly as long as you think it does. Pick up the phone and actually call your friend. Instead of sending an emoticon and half a sentence to sum up your state of mind, tell them (with your voice) how you feel. Take the time to ask how they are feeling, and then wait on the line to listen for their response. Or better still, pick up a pen and a piece of paper and invest a few minutes in putting your thoughts down on paper. You don’t have to be a wordsmith to send a love letter, some encouragement, a birthday card, or a simple line or two to let someone know you are thinking of them. If you can send a text message, you are more than qualified to send snail mail. And you are likely to make someone’s day if you take that step and actually drop a mail piece in the mail, push a note (no complaints, please) under your neighbor’s door, or place a cheerful card on someone’s desk when they least expect it. Before you mention it, let me say that having chicken scratch for handwriting does not excuse you. I have received letters in the past that were… how shall I say this… rather difficult to decipher. But I appreciated that it gave my mind a small workout to figure out what was written between the punctuation marks. Chicken scratched notes provide ample opportunity to chuckle at the possibilities as you try to guess the totally illegible words – and everyone knows laughter is good for you. So, if you have ambiguous handwriting, remember that by putting it down on paper and sending it to a loved one, you are actually giving them a double sized gift: a good laugh and a nifty puzzle all wrapped into one.

In celebration of the return to handwritten notes and cards, I am working on a creative project that shares the joy of sending and receiving physical mail. The images in this post include examples of some of my one-of-a-kind, illustrated cards and envelopes that are available in my craft store. These original art pieces can be hand-delivered or mailed (check with the postal system in your country to ensure they comply with your local postal restrictions). These are ORIGINAL artworks (not reproductions), so when you add your own words, you will have something to share that is entirely unique.

I still have family members and friends that make the time to send me snail mail. It remains a delight to find their piece of mail in my mailbox. I do the same for others, so I appreciate that it takes effort and the cost of a stamp to send a handwritten note.  Most – perhaps all – people I know are worth the effort (and a stamp). You don’t outgrow this small pleasure – not only of receiving snail mail, but also of sending it. So make this week the week you buy a stamp and write to that person you haven’t written to in many years. Go on – just do it!

Need stationery? Try the family-friendly DIY card kits from Zisubu Artique.

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