Before the first quarter of 2014 is over, I wanted to share our personal holiday cards. We sent this year’s cards out in January as a celebration of the upcoming year. Our goal was to encourage and inspire our friends and family with a card that wouldn’t be tucked away at the end of the season, and we also wanted something that was a bit interactive.

Using dip pen and ink, I hand lettered our wishes for them for 2014, and on the back, included the line “this year I (we) will:” We letterpress printed the cards onto super-thick, 220-lb Crane’s Lettra using hand-mixed dark green ink.

We challenged ourselves at the start of the design to use the remainder of lime green envelopes from a long-ago custom project. In addition to the dark green ink, we chose yellow-orange to be a pop of contrasting color, using it in custom envelope liners with a hand-drawn pattern.

The edges were also painted that same yellow-orange color (and it’s amazing how much that bit of color along the edges can transform the entire piece). Since 220-lb paper is so thick, it works really well for edge painting.