Christmas cards 2011

This is a typical Thanksgiving weekend---the Christmas cards task begins. Six years ago I started making our Christmas cards using block prints. This process involves carving an image onto a piece of wood and printing the image onto card stock with ink that has been rolled onto the wood block. My early cards were very simple with only black ink on white. 

Following is the block from my first card...

Following is a block also from a black on white printing.



Last year I used two colors. In this block, the background was orange and the second printing was with a rich blue.

 and this year I have saved white, but used orange, blue, and black. This required three wood blocks to complete and of course this means three separate printings on each of 120 Christmas cards. In this case I am including the final product, since there are three blocks used to make it...

 ...and they are all done...now to add the inscription, and mail them.