It's not Christmas until you send your first card

Before I skipped off to university I used to make the family Christmas cards every year. Mostly nativity or twee winter scenes in watercolours. While I was an undergrad the motivation slipped away, my time was precious, any spare time was spent with my new college friends who 'got' me, at that particular moment in time anyway.

Now that I'm back home for the time being, my days are long, with few friends with as much spare time nearby. So five years after making the last Xmas card, I shook out my dusty crafting skills and plotted to make a card this year.


Cutting out a small piece of lino is tricky so I kept the design as simple as possible.


One the lino is cut out, it takes a few prints for the paint to fully adhere to the surface of the lino, to give a successful impression. (Printing while listening to Christmas music is the best way to go about it).


I then added some simple embellishment to the peacock to make it sparkle!


I then left them to dry overnight.



Then I wrote them up and posted them before the last posting dates for Christmas! As you can see I also printed a greeting on the inside with the leftover vinyl.

My design was inspired by a peacock decoration I bought in Liberty of London in October. The peacock was a popular symbol and decorative trope used by the Aesthetic movement and in Art Nouveau designs, I felt this tied in with my plan to lino print the image onto the card (the inclination to art & craft). I chose secular imagery because I'd be sending them to friends who didn't celebrate Christmas, or were agnostics themselves.