Make your own Handmade Greeting Card

Festive season calls for greeting loved ones and showing them that you care. This season also calls for sending greeting cards to near and dear. Nothing compares to the warmth and joy of receiving a handmade card from loved ones. Crafted with love and care, these cards bring a lot of joy to the maker, giver and to the receiver.

Here is a quick DIY tutorial for simple, cute and easy-to-make greeting cards. I had made these cards earlier as an invite to a school event but the design can be replicated or improvised to make some good handmade greeting cards.

This tutorial describes the making of a prototype/ sample of a handmade invitation card. Once you get the basic card correct, you can make many cards in one go. Use your imagination, internet, left over materials & supplies, and computer printer to churn out the most-best-loveliest handmade cards for your loved ones.

Card Making Supplies, Material and Tools:

• Colored paper: You may chose to make cards in one, two or different colors. You can also make a color gradient card with different shades of the same color.
• Satin ribbon – to tie up the papers together
• Stapler to secure the pages, scissors to cut, and a pen to pen down your message.

How to make handmade greeting or invitation card
Arrange the different colored papers one upon the other, like even spaced steps. If you are using A4 size sheets of paper, you can make 4 cards out of one set of papers.

Evenly space out the paper pieces in steppe fashion. Carefully align the paper, one on top of the other before securing them. You can draw or print out images, messages, cartoons, or photos on each page of the card.

The bunched up papers look like the ones below. You have to secure the set of papers with a stapler to keep them together.You may choose to keep the loose ends of the paper neat, scalloped or cut in any fashion, depending upon the theme of the card.

Punch two holes near the stapled spot and tie satin ribbon bow in the color of your choice.This bow can conceal the staple pin too. Since this card was high on color, I chose white ribbon to balance it. Here are some of the samples I tried with different color ribons and diffirent cuts. All that remained was to write the message on these cards

Since this was an invitation card for a fancy dress competition, to be given by the children to the guests, I wrote the following wordings for invitation on the card.

Each loose end of the paper had space to write one line. Apart from the top paper (where the main invitation message comes) there were 6 loose end papers. Here is the message:

What will I be?
a rock-star, tiger or honey-bee…
an astronaut, doctor or Gandhi?
We lovingly invite you to see
the many things we can be!

Here is the prototype of the card with handwritten message. These messages can also be printed for neatness and then tied together.

As you flip each paper, you can see drawing/ cartoon images of what is written at the bottom. There is never a dull moment while reading this card. Six pages of simplicity, fun, color, imagination and a lovely message makes this card an adorable one.

You can fashion your invitation cards, party invites, Christmas greetings, New Year messages, save-the-date cards, thank you messages, and more on these lines. Eventually what matters is the message you write on them. So go quirky, funny, silly or sober, there are enough words of wisdom, quotations, or ideas on the net – when it comes to writing the message.

This Christmas, New Year, and hence forth, make you own cards. Involve your kids for some offbeat ideas and for their choice of colors. As you make these cards, you will make memories, like I did.

Have fun!