Make Your Own Greeting Cards

With so many occasions to buy greeting cards for, there are now a huge amount of retailers in the high streets and online that offer cards of all shapes and sizes. This is all good and well but I remember the days of making home-made cards when I was a child, and I remember how much fun it used to be. If you have children yourself, creating your own greeting cards with them can be an excellent way of doing things together as a family and also offers them a sense of achievement. We can now buy things at the click of a mouse which is extremely convenient but does it show the thought of giving something that we created with our own hands?

Modern Method

Many of the personalised greeting card websites let you pick and choose from a range of designs and let you add in your own messages and words. You can do something extremely similar if you have a computer with access to a printer, and at a fraction of the cost in the long term. What’s more is that you can truly personalise it by creating your own designs and adding your own images on to the card front. Kids also love being on the computer so why not let them add some of their creative flair to the designs. Laptops and PCs will normally come with Paint and a whole variety of free art software built in as standard, or you can browse the internet for art software, much of which is also free. However be sure that if you are creating your own card designs on a computer that your printer is able to process thicker card through it.

Old fashioned is more fun

Printing your own cards is probably the modern day version of a home-made greeting card but for me, nothing beats the old fashioned way. By this I mean actually making it from start to finish without any electronic gadgetry involved. Handmade cards also allow you to give it a more 3D aspect to it by adding layers rather than just a simple flat piece of stiff card that has been folded over. You can buy the basics for card making from any crafting shop but in reality, apart from the cardboard, there is nothing specific you actually need; you can create greeting card designs from anything and everything. So what are the sorts of things that you may want to use when creating handmade cards?
The size of the card you are going to make is entirely up to you, but for practicality I will always use an A4 sheet of card and then fold it over. Never use paper if you intend on making a card that stands up for any length of time. Once the card is folded over you can then get to work with designing it and this is where the kids love getting stuck in. you can decorate it with anything you like. Ribbons, adhesive lettering and glitter all work well. One think I like to do is to attach lettering to the card with adhesive foam tabs as this makes the letters stand out more, giving it a 3D effect. If you have a lot of time to work on a card, you could even make a collage out of scrap pieces of paper, or you could cut an intrinsic design into the face of the card using an art knife.
I know home-made greeting cards aren’t to everyone’s taste and wouldn’t suggest they fit every occasion, but it can be great fun for you and the kids. All too often, family members do things separately rather than things together and this is one way where you can have a bit of quality family time.