年賀状 (Nengajō - New Year Cards)

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Hello Sandwiches!

I hope you had a gorgeous Christmas. My first Tokyo Christmas was lots of fun and we even had a little Christmas party at Hello Sandwich HQ. Lots of food, mulled wine, Christmas carols, and no Tokyo Christmas would be complete without a tacky Christmas Cake. (Okay I caved in after last minute Christmas shopping in Shinjuku on Christmas eve listening to 'クリースマスケーキいかがでしょうか?’at every corner!). But now it's on to the next big exciting day - New Years Day.

Japan has so many lovely New Year traditions. I'm a little late (they are meant to be in the post before 25th December to arrive by 01/01) but I've just finished designing my (year of the rabbit) 年賀状 (New Year Cards). This year I used a super cute MdN mook to design the cards.

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The mook came complete with a CD-rom of all the cute elements any Japanese-wanna-be girl (Hello Sandwich) would ever need to create a card that looks like it just stepped out of a puri kura print club machine! Think tapes, ribbons, bows and cute handwriting style fonts. This mook is worth every cent.

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For the time poor, or those who are not as comfortable using the computer, the mook also comes complete with a large range of pre-made cards to simply print out.

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There are lots of free printables online (for example here and here) that you could crop and play around with to make your card. Or you could stock up on a collection of BNN pattern books. Either way, I'm sure you will have a lot of fun making your own 年賀状.

Love Love
Hello Sandwich
xoxo