It’s the Thought that Counts: Give Creative Christmas Cards this Season
If you’ve taken any time to scan on the internet, you’ll already know that there are thousands of pre-designed Christmas cards just waiting to be downloaded and printed out for you to send to your loved ones this season. But where’s the creativity? Where’s the personal touch, other than the signature inside? If we’re going to send people cards expressing our goodwill this season, let’s at least do it right.
So, assuming that you want to make Christmas cards yourself, in comfort and glad tidings at home, we’ll continue. The first thing we should explore is that, in a secular society, Christmas has many meanings and associative feelings, depending on who you ask. This is good for us. We can expand hugely upon the usual green-and-red things and bells and holly, which have, we should admit, somewhat lost their original meaning. We’ll hang on to this thought as we talk about designs. Which simply require your creativity and a computer and printer.
With our new blank canvas, we can think about what’s going to go on our card. Think ‘Christmas season’, and not traditional Christmas. What things go with Christmas that we particularly love, what is it that we share when we come together? A great idea is to make collages – describe your favourite winter walk, a crisp, snowy scene, where the empty space is the undisturbed snow, and you illuminate the features with cut-outs from magazines and newspapers. For a uniform texture, scan this into your computer, turn the image fully black-and-white, and make quality print-outs.
One quite original idea (I’m sure it’s been done before) is to give someone a wintry treasure hunt. To do this, print out the successive clues to be hidden, and place them in a complex trail around the house. This presumes you are regularly in this person’s home; you’re unlikely to be thanked for planting these clues uninvited.
Think back to previous Christmas periods – with family and close friends, you’ll no doubt have masses of photos at hand from this most photo-heavy season. How about making a photo-board from your existing pictures with a scanner and some simple image editing software to cut out the pieces digitally, meaning you can save the precious originals? Once you’ve layered several memorable shots, you can add your seasonal message and print your cards out to address a particular area of the photoboard to a particular relative.
Whatever choice you make, be original, and try to take a twist on the normal way of doing things. Use good quality paper and colour printer to make your design look the part. Plain print-out Christmas cards are just as dull as their cheap, shop-bought cousins. Change this with a little thought, and you’ll find the process of ‘doing your Christmas cards’ much more enjoyable for yourself too.
Kids Crafts Made Funner With Your Printer
It can be challenging to have kids, espcially when you need to find productive and creative things to keep them busy. If you own a computer and a printer, and can replace your ink cartridges when low on ink, you are at an advantage in that area. There is a wide variety of options for getting your kids to be creative.
If you have a budding artist on your hands, you may want to allow him to use the paint program in the computer. Painting through a computer is very different than painting with your hands and a brush. It may bring new ideas out while it presents new challenges. If you make sure that you have enough ink to print out anything your children create, you will make sure that you can have a finished product.
Yet another thing you can use your printer for is to have your kids begin a scrapbook. A great way to store the photos and other memorabilia that can keep memories of good times around for a long time is scrapbooking. Don’t forget to make sure that there is enough black ink and color ink in your ink cartridges to insure that you’ll be getting the best results. Make copies of photos for your kids to crop and place in their own albums. You can go even further by helping your children create and print stickers to put in their scrapbooks to make them even more personalized.
One space saving way to keep your kid’s science project that many parents don’t even think of is to take a picture of the finished project. If your kids create projects for school or home, and they are too big to keep, you can take a picture of the finished project, print it out on your printer, and keep the photo as a reminder of the beautiful project.
You can look up some printable crafts online as well, just make sure that your ink cartridges aren’t low on ink first. This is one of several possible ways to get your children excited about the possibilities associated with electronic creations, not to mention to get the creative juices flowing.
You can find and print sewing patterns online to help you teach your child how to sew, if you would like. By beginning with something simple, such as paper-based patterns to sew along to, a beginning sewer can more easily learn how to sew a straight line. Provided that there is enough ink in your ink cartridges, you can print out a handful of patterns for your little one to follow along to so he or she can practice. You can also find simple patterns for beginner projects to do together.
Using your printer is a great way to bring out the creative side of your kids. You might be surprised by the things your children can come up with after they’ve been given some guidance.