How To: Angel Christmas Card

I do love sewing, but I love paper crafting too - especially at Christmas! The final angel-themed project of the week is for making pretty cards. I've used paper doilies to decorate the angel's dresses, but you could use glitter or glue sequins on if you prefer something a bit more sparkly.

To make your own angel Christmas cards, you will need:

- The templates provided at the bottom of this post
- Scissors
- A fine tipped black pen & a pencil
- Prittstick or other paper-friendly glue
- Gold and silver paper ( metallic gift wrap, or kraft paper).
- White paper doilies, approx. 5 inches / 12.5cm in diameter
- Coloured paper for the angel's face, feet and hair (or felt tips and/or coloured pencils in the desired colours)
- Card blanks (I used some lovely recycled blank cards from Paperchase, but any colour which will help the white, silver and gold of your angel stand out would work).

1) Use the templates provided to cut out 1 each of the following shapes: wings (silver), halo (gold), dress (white), hair (your chosen hair colour, or white) feet and face (skin colour, or white).

Flip your templates over, and draw around them with a pencil so that when you cut the shapes out your pencil marks will be at the back and hidden on the finished card. If you're planning on making lots of angel cards to give to family and friends, you may find it helpful to glue your templates to some thin card (e.g. a cereal box) and cut them out again to create sturdy templates you can use repeatedly.

2) The use the dress template to cut out a piece from your paper doily. Try to arrange the template so the pattern on the doily's border is symmetrical. You only need one piece for each angel, but I found I could cut five pieces from the 5 inch (12.5cm) doilies I was using.

3) If necessary, colour in the face, feet and hair shapes. Then use a fine tipped black pen to draw eyes and a mouth on the face (make sure you leave room to stick the hair on later!). You now have all the pieces for your angel.

4) Use prittstick to glue the wings in position - make you you leave enough room for the head, halo and toas and for any message you want to write on the front of the card. Then glue the feet and the plain white dress shapes in position so that they slightly overlap (with the feet sticking out from under the bottom of the dress).

5) Then carefully glue the white doily dress shape on top. To do this, I turned the doily piece over and placed it on a piece of scrap paper. I dabbed it carefully with the glue stick and then picked it up (leaving the excess glue behind on the paper) and lightly positioned it over the plain white dress to ensure it matched up before pressing it down gently.

6) Stick the hair onto the top of the face, and the halo to the back of the head so you end up with something that looks like this:

7) Then stick the head & halo piece in position.

8) Finally, use the fine-tipped black pen to write your message on the card in your best handwriting. You may find it helpful to write the message in pencil first to make sure you don't make a mistake with the spacing / positioning of the text. Or you could print out a message and glue it in position, or miss out this step entirely. 

To print the templates - right click on the image and select to view it in another window or tab, then click again (if necessary) to view full size and print at 100%. I've added a scale so you can check if your templates have printed out correctly :)

This tutorial is for non commercial use only: you can use it for as many cards as you like to send to friends and family but please don't make any for sale. Please feel free to borrow photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to the original source, and do not reproduce my entire tutorial on your site. Thanks!