December is a busy month so let Mountaincow help you with your holiday plans. Make fabulous invitations for holiday and New Year’s Eve parties and get a head start on present swapping by creating personalized gift enclosures and thank you notes. And if you are ready to start shopping for holiday gifts, look no further! We’ve got ideas for everyone on your list.

Celebrate good times, c'mon!
Holiday parties come in all shapes and sizes – they can be sophisticated soirees with Champagne and passed hors d’oeuvres or a cookie swap complete with kids running around on a sugar high. Whatever type of get-together you’re planning, we have the right invitation design.

The PrintingPress invitation traded in traditional red and green for the soft pink and meadow colors of Cotton Candy stationery. Each letter of the word “celebration” in the Ryan font from Fonts & Graphics 3 is set to a different color to create an upbeat invite. All the other text is green to match the envelope.

Catch the Platinum design if you can, it’s a charming Gingerbread man ! Set as a background image, this smart cookie has the details of the party written in white Meegles font from Fonts & Graphics 3 to look like icing. We used a rotated text box to tuck in the R.S.V.P. details along his side. Send in a Deep Red A6 envelope.

Extreme users can create a classy design on Café au Lait stationery. We combined the Alyssa font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings and Benjamin Strong from Fonts & Graphics 2 for an elegant look. We then shadowed each capital letter by floating the letter in a larger point size in a soft sage in front of it. We made the floating letters semi-transparent, so the bold brown shows through them. Finally, we added a thin, matching sage custom border.

PrintingPress sample
(click photo to enlarge)

PrintingPress Platinum sample
(click photo to enlarge)

PrintingPress Extreme sample
(click photo to enlarge)

PrintingPress Extreme sample
(click photo to enlarge)

Passing notes
The holiday season is the perfect time for you to let your child’s teachers know how much you appreciate all their efforts. So if you’re sending your child to school with little gifts for teachers and friends, make sure everyone from the bus driver to the school nurse knows who the gifts are from by creating gift enclosures with your kid’s name on them. We used a white 4-bar folded card and created a custom pattern using red polka dots on a field of red for the background of the card. Write your message in white using the Alyssa font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings and pair with a Deep Red 4-bar envelope. We used the Inner Envelope feature to address the envelope with just the teacher’s name.

Gift gratefulness
The holiday season brings an onslaught of gifts, so get prepared and print a batch of thank-you notes now so you can send them out even before the gifts have been added to the toy box.

PrintingPress users can be a deer and print a cute holiday image of a reindeer caught in Christmas lights. “Thank you” is written below in Meegles from Fonts & Graphics 3. Pair with a Deep Red A2 envelope.

The Platinum design continues the holiday theme with a border of Christmas lights and a message of gratitude in Noodles from Fonts & Graphics 3. Pair with a Deep Red A2 envelope. Or, for a different look, match the envelope to any one of the cheerful lights.

Extreme users can send a warm thank you with chilly snowman on the front. We created a solid blue background with a darker blue custom border and added the snowman image to the center of the card. The snowman’s arms are extended wide, and we wrote “Thank you this much!” in Brina from Fonts & Graphics 3. We used an inverted semi-circle text shape so the text wraps around the bottom of the snowman. Pair with a Dusty Blue A2 envelope.

PrintingPress sample
(click photo to enlarge)

PrintingPress Platinum sample
(click photo to enlarge)

PrintingPress Extreme sample
(click photo to enlarge)

PrintingPress sample
(click photo to enlarge)

PrintingPress Platinum sample
(click photo to enlarge)

PrintingPress Extreme sample
(click photo to enlarge)

Midnight madness
Hosting a New Year’s Eve bash? Show your guests how you’ll ring in the new year with a fabulous invitation.

Countdown with class using the PrintingPress design. Under the image of bubbly chilling on ice, we used the Alyssa and Benjamin Caps fonts from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings. Pair with a Dusty Blue A6 envelope.

Time to use your printer’s borderless printing function on this Platinum design. See the November 2004 Tech Tip to get this entire invitation printed to the edge of your paper. Most printers need to use a standard photo size, so we chose Café au Lait stationery with 5x7 cards and A7 envelopes. We added a background image of a clock about to strike midnight and included the party details to the left using the Alyssa font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings.

The Extreme design uses several overlapping semi-transparent martinis to create a mod look. The trick is that we used blank floating text boxes with a background fill and a border set to the martini shape. Extreme users can create more than 30 different shapes by adding a background color and choosing a border shape on a text box. For more information on creating shapes using text boxes, see the Extreme Tip. We used the Meegles font from Fonts & Graphics 3 and paired the invitation with a Magenta A6 envelope.

Under $50
Mountaincow Scrapbooking Platinum software will definitely delight the scrapbooker on your list. Whether she’s a beginner or a hard-core cropper, this new scrapbook tool will enable her make beautiful pages with the help of her computer.

Think about getting the Mountaincow Scrapbooking Software for yourself so you can make gifts like mini-albums for your entire family.

Under $30
Need a stocking stuffer for your clip-art crazed friend or a little something for the bride-to-be knee-deep in wedding planning? Add Fonts & Graphics 3 or Fonts & Graphics for Weddings to her collection. The original fonts and images will work on any computer so no worries if you don’t know what her byte’s like.

Under $10
Have you upgraded to PrintingPress Extreme yet? If so, you can make everyone on your list personalized stationery. Use their full name or just the first initial and fill it with a pattern. Print their return address on the envelopes, and you've created a one-of-a-kind gift! We’ve even got a sample project to get you started. We used Café au Lait A2 folded notecards. Click here to download the PrintingPress Extreme project.

(click photo to enlarge)