A great gift idea!

One of my hobbies is creating post card stationery. It's cheap and easy and everyone loves personalized stuff.

With Christmas coming up, personalized notecards make great gifts for teachers, extended family, long-distance friends, etc.

Here's how to do it!

• Create your design in a photoshop type software program. (I personally do not own photoshop. I use Adobe Photodeluxe Home Edition 3.1 - which was FREE with the purchase of my scanner.)
• Size your blank template to 8x10in. (You will be reducing the size, but it needs to be large enough file to scale down without reducing the quality of the image.)
• Create your design
• Save as a .jpg file
• Open up a blank document in MS Word
• Insert your new image.
• Resize the image to 4.25" x 5.31"
• Change the layout to "square" and drag it to the corner.
• Copy the image and paste three additional images in the other three corners.
• Save the document.

You can print these at home, but you will need high quality cardstock, a laser printer and a cutting board to cut straight lines. OR....

Upload your document to Kinkos. The site will walk you through the ordering process. At the Kinkos near my home, one page of black and white ink (on any color of paper) was $.20/each. Because you are printing 4 cards per page, you are essentially getting each card for $.05/each. Kinkos does charge a cutting fee which is $2.50/cut, but it is worth it - trust me! If you decide to go with color ink, the cost goes up to $1.20 per page (or $.30/card).

The final cost for 24 post cards (or 6 pages) on premium cardstock is approximately $6.20 (that includes the two cuts).

The beauty of it is, that you can do several different jobs at one time: 6 pages for the teacher, 6 pages for a friend, 6 pages for your sister, but only pay the cutting fee one time! So, if you do decide to do this project, do as many as you need at one time, to avoid paying the cutting fee for each job!

And finally, because they are post card sizes, they can be mailed without an envelope and you can use postcard postage rate, which is $.24/each.

Like I said, cheap and easy! Here's a sample:




Have fun creating your designs! If you need technical help, feel free to contact me!