Have a Handmade Christmas {Week 6}

 Hello! Welcome to this week's Have a Handmade Christmas! To be honest I am a little more in the mood for Thanksgiving right now as I am sure many of you are as well. We will see if their are many other posts linked up this week or not. :-)

 However we will press on with our creating of handmade gifts, decorations and other things to make our Christmas memorable and hopefully frugal too!

 This week I decided to make some note cards. I like to give them to friends. They are a simple but fun and practical gift and something I think is extra special about them is the fact that not only do they make the one you give them to happy but if that person uses them they will make a bunch more people happy too.

 I have written about note cards before but these are a bit different style and are easy to make while at the same time recycling old seed catalogs, magazines or calendars.

To make them you need:

• Card stock
• Pictures
• Glue stick
• Scissors
• A damp rag
• Pen or pencil

To start I cut the card stock in half and then folded each half in half to create a nice card. Then I found some pictures that I like that were big enough to cover the whole front of the card. I decided to do garden photos. The are from the Baker's Seed Company and they are very pretty high quality photos that I think a gardener will really love.

 Next I traced around the card on the picture (choosing the spot I wanted to have on my card- to be where I traced).

 Next I cut out where I had traced.

 Now I put a smooth layer of glue all over the front of the card.

Then I carefully put the picture on to the gluey card front and pressed it flat. Then there are usually little edges that hang over so I trim them off. If you get a bit of glue on the card or your hands- just use your damp rag to wipe it off.

 They are ready to dry! I did some cards with the pictures vertical and some horizontal. It works fine either way. I made a couple of sets of these garden cards- above is just one of the sets.

 Then I like to make envelopes from some of the really big pictures. You don't have to make envelopes, you can buy them, but we like the cheery colors of homemade ones (and the people that receive our letters say that they like them too) and we also like the fact that we are recycling when we make them.

 This is what the envelopes look like after being folded up. After that we put on a blank address label so that the address can be written on white rather than on the very colorful envelope. You can just tape the envelopes shut to seal.

I also made some floral cards in a little different way. These pictures were smaller so I cut them out, mounted them on a colored piece of paper that coordinated with the flower and then using double sided tape I put that on the front of the card. It is very quick and easy but yet colorful and pretty! 

 Here are two finished sets each with 6 cards and envelopes (the garden produce set has homemade envelopes and the floral set has plain Jane purchased envelopes). I have plans for giving away some of my garden sets to some friends but one of these sets is for one of you! The winner will get to chose the set they want.

To Enter the giveaway (read carefully because I am going to make it a little different)

• 1st entry (do this one first or any others will not count) Head over to my post on Thanksgiving and tell me something about your thanksgiving (either this year or a past year) and then come back to this post and tell me that you did and which card set you want if you win.
• additional entries: Link up a Handmade Christmas post to this post and then leave a comment saying you want to be in the giveaway drawing. Become a follower of my blog (using google connect, e-mail subscription or an RSS feed)-Current followers count too. Then leave another comment saying you did that.

This giveaway is open to anybody. It will be open until December 4th. Please be sure to leave your e-mail so I can contact you if you win!

This post is linked to Frugal Fridays- $10 gifts (and under) edition.

Now it is your turn to share what handmade things you have been working on!

Please remember to link to your specific post and to link back to here so that more people will hear about it and join in. Thanks!