Tapir Christmas cards

I've been back in DC for about a week now and things are busy as ever! Carlos and I had a great time in Redmond with my parents and now we are getting back to work in DC. I leave for Costa Rica in about a week and a half to teach the dry season graduate fundamentals of tropical ecology course. Everything is coming together and this is shaping up to be another fantastic course. I will be in the field (and all over Costa Rica) for a little over 2 months -- I return at the end of March -- so things might be sparse on the blog front while I'm gone.

In the meantime, I need to catch up on bloggy things! I have a few adventures to post about that actually happened before our Washington state trip and I also have a lot of crafty things that I can finally post about because I don't have to keep secret surprises from people any more!

One of the crafty things that I had a great time doing was making my traditional hand-made Christmas cards. My theme this year involved a Malayan tapir mimicking the colors and pattern of a candy cane. I actually thought up this theme a looong time ago (back in May) when my Alaska buddy Julia and I had an art night (interspersed with plenty of time playing Donkey Kong Country Returns and eating sour peach Dots). The card-making process actually took a long time.

Starting with the initial sketch, I hand-transferred the image to each card using carbon paper.

From there, I colored in and inked each card using Copic markers (this took a while).

From there, I measured, cut, and glued pieces of brown paper to the backs of each card and with that, the cards were ready for their messages!

I also carved a little label stamp to put on each red envelope (with white ink). This is where I filled in addresses.

And with that, I mailed out my cards (using my favorite evergreen stamps) -- I really like how they turned out! In total, I made 20 cards. It was a lot of work, but I like this tradition and I hope my friends and family like it too~