May 07, 2015

DIY Mother's Day Photo Cards

A photo card can be a wonderful gift, but add in handwritten sentiments and you have a priceless card! Today, Pam Baldwin is here with us to share how EASY it is to make a beautiful photo card!!

With Mother’s Day approaching, you might be on the hunt for the perfect cards to celebrate the amazing moms in your life! Trying to figure out what to get my mom and my mother-in-law can be tricky, but making sure I include an updated photo of my kids is a guaranteed win. And with that in mind, I thought I’d share my super easy double duty DIY photo card.

I love the photo cards you can find online from companies like Minted and Shutterfly and Tiny Prints, but I’m just never organized enough to get everything together in time. I’ve been making my own photo cards for a few years now and they’re always a hit with my friends and family!

I often use Photoshop Elements to bring my projects together, but it is definitely not “required” for this type of project. All you really need is a photo you love, a bit of cardstock, an adhesive runner and a few of your preferred embellishments to “fancy it up” a bit. If you’re new to Photoshop Elements and would like to follow along with how I use it, I’ve got a quick little video to show you how I size photos for my card canvases and how to create a clipping mask (and give your photo a nice little white border with rounded corners).

First up are the cards I made from my kids to their Grandmas. Once your photos are printed, you’ll trim them down to size and embellish away.

I like to keep my embellishments super simple and allow them to complement the photo rather than distract from it. For these cards, I cut out little banners to say “Happy Mother’s Day” and attached them to my photo with foam pop dots. I also added a wood veneer heart and called it done.

On the inside, there’s a “happy mother’s day” message from my son, which is actually his writing made digital. I love including his handwriting into my projects, but at age 5, it can be a challenge. I had him write his message on a large sheet of plain white paper, took a photo, opened it in Photoshop elements, selected just his writing and resized it to fit the inside of the card. If you’re interested in learning how to make your handwriting digital, there’s a tutorial in lesson 5 of my Text Tricks class that will walk you through my process. I printed the message on heavy weight matte photo paper and used it for my card base.

I folded my card base to size, trimmed off the excess, ran adhesive around the other borders of the photo and stuck the pieces together.

I finished this card by rounding the corners. My kids are really excited to give these to their Grandmas for mother’s day!

I also wanted to make a card for my mom just from me. Having kids of my own now, I appreciate all the hard work she put into raising me more than ever!! I have a favourite photo of me and my mom when I was a baby, and I thought it would be pretty awesome to be able to give her this sentimental little reminder of us. This photo is more than 30 years old, obviously before the age of digital cameras. I scanned it into my computer making sure the keep the resolution setting at least 300 dpi. I added a white border and rounded corners to the photo in Photoshop Elements before printing it (you can see that process in the video above).

I printed my photo at home on glossy 4x6 photo paper, trimmed the excess off the photo, stitched on a little banner, and attached it to a folded cardstock base. I left the inside blank so I can handwrite my mom a special message from me.