Chinese New Year is the biggest holiday in my family especially my maternal-grandmother. She always fussed if her grandchildren - especially the ones that she raised - didn't give her Chinese New Year greetings. When I left my home country to take my bachelor degree in Taiwan, I made sure to send her and the rest of the family (Grand Aunt/Grand Uncle, uncle, aunts), Chinese New Year cards in addition calling them during Chinese New Year holidays. They loved the cards I sent them. My Grandmother even proudly told me once that she kept all cards I sent her.
It was fairly easy to find Chinese New Year cards in Taiwan. Here, in US, it's... impossible. Well, there might be some places selling it. I just didn't find it and didn't spend too much time trying to find it.
Had I mention that Chinese New Year cards were the trigger of me getting into card making? I made my simple Chinese New Years cards years ago using only printer (to print the templates), scissors, markers and some glitter glue.
Last year I made quiet an improvement to my Chinese New Years cards with my Cricut machine. I created the Chinese style background in Photoshop and using Cricut to print it. I cut the 福 (fú) - happiness and 春 (chūn) - spring, and the ingot using Cricut as well. I intentionally put the characters upside down on both card. This is something I learnt when I was in Taiwan. The Mandarin of upside down 倒 (dǎo) and arrive 到(dào) are very similar (especially to non-Mandarin speaker 😉). So, during Chinese New Year, people put 福 (fú) - happiness and 春 (chūn) - spring upside down as a symbol of the arrival of spring/happiness.
In these two cards on the right, if you notice, I use both positive and negative of Cricut-cut background. I used the positive on the card on the right - the one with white background and used the negative on the right card. I was able to make 2 cards with just one Cricut run in this way. Also I just adhered general Chinese New Year greetings on these two cards.
I can't find any Chinese New Year greetigns in Mandarin (yet? 😋). These greetings were printed with regular printer machine and cut the the size I needed.
For these cards, I used origami papers as my background. I got these spring/Chinese/Japanese themed origami papers at Daiso. It's very thin but they were perfect for Chinese New Year cards.
The little girl and boy carrying ingot were also cut using Cricut. I found the picture online, cleaned it up with Photosop and uploaded them to Cricut Design Space.
These were my general Chinese New Years Cards I made on 2016 and 2017. They were really quiet an improvement compared to the one I first made on 2015, don't you think so?
Happy Crafting,
Sherls
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