I have to admit to loving most things Japanese, but owning a Cricut has truly familiarised me with a new world of washi tape and washi paper (and of course the famous washi setting.

I love this effect – it can be used for all sorts of different cards (and I’ll be making lots of different kinds) but as my homeland is currently sweltering in a very un-British summer (i.e. it’s boiling hot) I thought…CHRISTMAS!!! Yeah! Let’s do a Christmas card!

I’m not deliberately being silly – I’ve noticed a lot of people in craft forums discussing what they’re going to make for Christmas – after all, it’s the busiest time of the year and super-hard to keep up if you don’t plan in advance! In that spirit, I’ve decided to make this card. Though the instructions are for ANY washi card as this is a great technique to get the hang of. Washi tape is inexpensive, freely available and adds such colour and interest to designs. I also love the fact that I never know quite what I’m going to find when I go out to buy it!

The one I’ll be making today is the one with the holly (above) – this will be available for FREE, exclusively on this site for a this week only. The other two are available in our shop.

You will need:

Rolls of washi tape – however many you require depends on the effect you’re after. I’ve used a very small amount of two or three rolls for each card

Approximately two sheets of A4 (or letter-sized) white cardstock (I’ve used 170gsm)

Small amount (half a letter-sized or A4 sheet) of a contrasting cardstock (I’ve used glittery or metallic cardstock for this in my examples)

Our svg file, which you can get by filling in the form below:

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If you want to make the other cards, they are available in our shop, with a matching festive envelope!

Also, please note – these have been made to conveniently fit on readily-available cardstock sizes: as these are vector files, you can easily resize them, held back only the size of your cardstock and cutting mat!

Equipment wise, we’ve used a light grip cutting map, the fine blade (the machine I used was the Cricut Maker but any cutting machine worth its salt will handle this EASILY) and the basic stylus tool (though this is only to fold it in half so if you don’t have one then the edge of a pair of scissors (or an empty ballpoint pen) and a ruler can easily score the line in the same way.

Preparing the file:

Open a New Project and click on ‘Import Images’. Choose the file you’ve downloaded – if you’re making the holly card it’ll be this case it’s ‘HollyWashiChristmasCard.svg’ (or whatever format your machine uses). Your canvas will show the pieces of the card: Currently, all of the pieces are grouped together, so you need to Ungroup them (do this either by right-clicking and then selecting ‘Ungroup’ from the dropdown menu, or choosing ‘Ungroup’ at the bottom of the list of items in the right-hand margin. Once the pieces are ungrouped, click on the line in the centre of the card. It’s currently a cut line, but it needs to be a score line (as it’s going to be the fold down the centre of the card). Once it’s selected, you’ll see it’s highlighted in the list of items in the right hand margin. Click on the Scissors next to the item and the Layers Attribute will appear. From here, select the Stylus icon (Score) at the top of the Layers Attribute panel, and you’ll see that on the canvas, the line in the centre of the card has been transformed into a dashed line. It’s now a score line! Now, select the line and the white rectangle of the card (either by clicking on them both, or selecting them in the right-hand margin (you’ll have to click on shift to select multiple items in the right-hand margin) and, with both selected, click on ‘Attach’ (either at the bottom of the right-hand margin panel, or by right-clicking and selecting ‘Attach’ from the dropdown menu that appears. At this point, you might find that the card jumps in front of your design on the canvas, so you can’t see it. Don’t panic – you’ll see that it’s still there when you come to cut. Now, your card is ready to cut!

Cutting the pieces:

Click on ‘Make It!’ and you will see the following screen (though I’ve found Design Space can be quite random in the order it cuts things out!): I used normal medium-weight cardstock, and found that (on the Cricut Maker ) the ‘Cardstock (For Intricate Cuts)’ is the best setting. Once that’s cut, your machine will invite you to cut the second lot of pieces.

Once they’re done…you’re ready to assemble the card!

Assembling the card:

You will have the following pieces:

Fold the card in half. Take the large white backing ‘Merry Christmas!’ piece and glue the loose exclamation mark and dot (in your contrasting colour – in our case, in glitter gold cardstock!) over the ‘i’ onto it. Continue, adding ‘Merry’ and ‘Christmas.’ Glue the contrasting and slightly smaller square holly piece (which, in our case is on white cardstock) on top of the larger holly piece (the one that has a scalloped edge), matching the cut-out sections carefully so as to see as little of the backing piece as possible where the holly shape is. Now, take your folded card. Using a rule, measure down the edge of the card on the left-hand side to 4cm and make a tiny mark (I’ve done this with pen, purely so you can see it – I’d recommend you use pencil!). Do the same on the right-hand side, and then draw a line across, joining the two marks together. On top of this line (using it as a guide, to keep the tape straight), apply the washi tape, matching up the edge of the tape with the left-hand side of the card, and moving slowly, taking care to follow the line. Once you get to the right-hand edge, cut carefully with a pair of scissors. Repeat Step 5 with a second row of tape (in whatever colour you decide – we’ve gone for a second row of green so that the holly leaves fit on top neatly: Repeat again with a third row. This time, we’ve gone for red, for the holly berries. Now, we need to attach the holly piece to the card. It should be positioned so that the ‘cut-out’ holly section of the scalloped square is over the washi section – so the berries appear red and the leaves green. There are many ways you can do this, but for this particular card we’re going for an asymmetric effect, so we’re tilting the piece and moving it slightly to the right. You can attach it by simply applying glue to the back of the piece, but we’ve chosen for this example to use glue pads so there’s a slightly 3-D effect to the card. Finally, we applied the same glue pads (again, you can use normal glue if you don’t want a three-dimensional effect!) to the ‘Merry Christmas!’ message. Our card is complete!

Fancy having a go yourself? Download the file by filling in the form below:

Other versions of this card are available in our CraftAGoGo Shop.

And don’t forget to let us know how you get on making this or our other projects in the CraftAGoGo Crucial Crafting Facebook group!