Holiday Card Templates

It's the time of year again to make holiday cards. Red River Paper has contracted me again to make some fun templates for you to use to easily make your own custom Christmas Cards. I've created three designs for 2010 and I love them all. They are bright fun colors and easy to slip you own photos into an customize the text. If you've always wanted to make you own holiday cards and have them look professional...here's an easy way to do it. Just go to Red River Paper's site buy a template and some of their amazing cardstock which is pre-scored so it folds nice and neat, pop your photos into the template in photoshop, print and voila! Custom Holiday Cards. Here are the designs I created with some photos from my recent sessions in them. It took me longer to pick out which photos I wanted to put on teh cards than it did to actually create them from the template.

Holiday Blue with photos of Isla. She'll be about 8 weeks old on Christmas, a perfect Holiday gift. If she were mine. I would customize this card with her date of birth and weight in the empty white square and make it a combination birth announcement/holiday card. It's a portrait orientation card that when folded her feet would be on the back and the family photo would be on the front. Too Cute!

Holiday Red with photos of Roman, Lydia and Brian that I shot this evening. Roman is a cutie and I love photographing him. Lydia is amazing and already had her house totally decorated with real presents under the tree. I am such a slacker. All I've done it take other people's holiday photos and create three card designs ;) This one is a landscape oriented card and when you make it you have to put the photos on the back in upside down but I've taken it apart here and put the font on the top for you and the back on the bottom. I don;t want you to have to turn your computer upside down to see the back. lol.

Holiday Green with a photo of my sweet nieces I took on Thanksgiving. This is also a portrait orientation card so the photo will be on the front and the date will be on the back when it's folded.

Try them out. Each design comes in four different sizes so you can print different sized cards for everyone on your list.

Valentine's Cards

I've been doing a little graphic design work lately and my first set of cards is in the store. So excited! I was contact by Red River Paper to create some custom photoshop and photoshop elements templates for their customers who by their amazing inkjet greeting card paper.

If you print at home and you haven't tried Red River paper yet...I use it at school and it's great! The 12x12 scrapbook paper is perfect for the custom scrapbook pages I make and the card paper is scored in the center to fold smoothly.

Here are a few of the templates I created and you can see the rest in the gallery at redriverpaper.com. All the templates are created with a front and a back so they fold down the middle. They might look strange here but you have to imagine them folded like a card. If you are used to using photoshop you can see how they will work. You open the template and then copy and paste your photo into the template. Drag your photo layer over the grey rectangle "photo" layer in the Layers Panel and then create a clipping mask and your photo magically takes the shape of the photo box in the template. You might have to resize it using the transform command after that but it is so easy to create your own personal cards using the templates. With the cost of greeting cards at the store, I really like making my own cards. These cards are a great deal. When you buy a card design you get 4 different card sizes in your download. If you like them you should but some and make your own cards. Very easy and a nice personal gift for your loved ones.

Candy Hearts - The card design from the Conversation Hearts photo shoot a few weeks ago. Seriously, I had to pick through the bag of hearts to find the few that had readable words on them. You would be shocked at how few of the hearts even had words on them.

Brown Polka Dots - I think this was my third design and I wanted to make one that wasn;t completely typical "Valentine" red and pink. Pink and brown is really trendy right now and I think this could be used not just for Valentine's day but for any kind of I Love You or Thinking of You or Anniversary kind of card.

Red Love - This was the second card I designed and I really like it. OK..I love it.

Arlington Scrapbook Show

I've blogged about Red River Paper before but I thought I'd talk about them again because I just saw their booth at the Scrapbook Show at the Arlington Convention Center. Drew Hendrix had contacted me about printing some of my pages on his paper to display in the Red River booth at the show and of course I'm always up for seeing my work displayed so I sent him some files and I went out to the show this afternoon and...WOW! It was so cool to see my scrapbook pages printed on his fantastic paper. The Red River Ultra Pro Satin and Premium Matte paper made my pages look fabulous. If you print any of your own photos on an inkjet printer at home you should check out Red River paper the quality is fantastic and the price is amazing.

They also sell paper to make your own greeting cards, it is precut for popular card sizes and is pre-scored so that when you fold it, the fold is perfectly straight and in the exact middle of the card. It costs less than $1 in paper, ink and envelope to make your own customized greeting cards. That's pretty amazing. I came home and I was looking for some cards I had created to print on the card paper and I found my Christmas card from last year. I thought I would share it with you. I really love it. Here's what I did to make the card. First I went to Michael's looking for an ornament to hang on my tree to put a picture into and photograph but

 that's now what I ended up doing. I bought the 2008 frame ornament but it was square and did not fit the picture I wanted to use on my card. That's not going to stop me! I scanned the frame on my flatbed scanner, cut it in half and added a few inches to the sides to make it a rectangle. Then I had to place my photo in the frame and add some text and a little sparkle on the 2008. I think it turned out well. I like making cards they are like mini scrapbook pages.

Speaking of scrapbook pages, after I made the card I wanted to use the frame again so I created the first page of my 2008 scrapbook with it. The pages are like little puzzles and I have so much fun figuring out where to put all my photos and embellishments sometimes I move things

 around quite a bit before I come up with the finished page. That's one of the reason's I like digital scrapbooking. I can change it as many times as I want and nothing gets torn or messed up. In traditional scrapbooking once you glue it down or cut your photo or your paper...it's done there's no going back. In digital I can undo as much as I like.

Then other thing I like about digital scrapbooking is the cost. If I use Drew's Red River Paper to print my pages it costs me about $1.50. The page about cost me a grand total of $1.50. Yes I did buy a bow for $.99 and the frame for $3.99 but those weren't really bought for the page they were bought for the card :) Even if I say I bought them for the page my total cost is $7.50 and I have an ornament to hang on my Christmas tree next year.

If I were to create this page the traditional scrapbook way I would have to start with a piece of white card stock which would run me about $1, then I would need shiny red card stock to create my frame: another $1 or so, a piece of red satin ribbon about a buck, a package of rhinestones to make the 2008 would probably run me about $5, and a piece of silver paper to put behind the 2008 and red frame to make it look like the real frame is another buck. You are up to $8 already and you haven't printed your photos yet. This page was a 12x12 so the big picture would have to be printed on 8x10 paper and the smaller photo on 4x6 paper. If you print them at a store you are looking at about $10 or so. Then you need the fancy archival pen to write the words, oops, two of them because most of the words are grey but a few are red, and you will need the glue or other adhesive to attach all the parts my guess would be about $10 more. So...grand total $28. It's quite a difference. As much as I scrapbook, digital make cents (pun intended) for me!

Puppy Scrapbook Page

I was inspired to make a new scrapbook page tonight while I was sending some of my files to Drew Hendrix of Red River Paper for him to use as examples. Have you ever used Red River paper? It is fantastic. I love their glossy surface. It has a nice weight to it that is a bit heavier than a lot of the inkjet photo papers out there so it really feels like a commercially printed photo.

So anyway, I had this photo of my puppy on my desktop and I've been waiting for a chance to make a page from it so I used this really cute black and white themed kit called Sweet Memories I found online at http://senidesigns.blogspot.com/ This designer is competing in a contest called "So You Think You Can Design" over at Digiscrap Addicts. There are a ton of talented designers competing and all the kits are free! You just have to register to download.

I don't normally just use one kit to scrap a page but I really liked how my photo fit with the colors and elements in the kit. I may go back and add some elements from another kit for a little pop of color before I print it but tonight I'm really liking the monochromatic look.

Want me to scrap your every day? I am available for S4H. Contact me if you are interested.