Go to most any paint or home improvement store and you'll find that they're usually thrilled to give away old sample books of wallpaper.  That's right, give them away, as in for free, gratis, nada.  This represents an incredible find for creative crafters -- free supplies!  If the first store you try doesn't have any to give away, keep trying.  I hit the jackpot here in Big Bear when I stopped in to the Yarn Designer's Boutique for knitting supplies.  Shop powner Gena Hester also does interior design, and she had lots of out of date wallpaper sample books.  I went home with a car load.

The sample books provide wonderful papers for all kinds of craft projects, and once you start flipping through the pages, you'll come up with all kinds of uses for the various designs.  It was in a book of country style wallpapers that I found this angel in a border print.  I cut her out and glued her to a blank card, added a few paper punched embellishments, and presto -- almost instant Christmas card.

Be aware that most sample book show the same design in a variety of color schemes (as you can see in the photo at the bottom of this page, the scrap in the photo has a red border, where the paper we used for our card has a blue border), so if you come with a design or idea you like, you can usually make 3 or 4 versions of from the same style papers.

The photo at the bottom of this page shows our finished card and a page from our country style wallpaper sample book of the same design in a different color scheme.  Since we wanted our angel to be flying in a star and snow filled night sky, we put the top of our card at the top of the paper and cut out our image accordingly.  We used spray mount to glue the wallpaper scrap to our blank card.

We then found a wallpaper sample in dark blue and cut it to the wideth of our card.  We tore one edge to leave an irregular white border, then glued the strip to the bottom of the card.  We then glued a gold border, cut from another wallpaper sample, at the bottom of the card.

With our paper punches, we used the blue and gold paper scraps to punch out the word "Joy," which we glued on the dark blue strip, along with some stars and snowflakes that we randomly glued to the background.