Mother's Day card using clip art

Of the card styles that I make regularly, this one is by far my favourite. It's quick, simple, looks quite professional and it's fast becoming my, "Quick, I need a card!" kind of card.

I have to admit, I do cheat a bit though - OK a lot!

I LOVE the microsoft office images website. If you've never had a browse, it's full of copyright free images that you can use for your own personal projects.  Of course you couldn't go into production and start selling your cards using their images, but it's perfect for finding images for your own use.

This is a card I made for my mum several years ago using a piece of clip art -

As you can see, it's just an image, that I've altered, printed onto an acetate transparency, attached to a card with eyelets and then decorated with ribbon.  Quick, simple and pretty stylish.

So I had a card emergency this weekend (as one does!)  My other half realised that he needed a card for next weekend.

Being slightly short of card inspiration, I decided to wheel out my trusty standby card...

I took one very nice image of a peony from microsoft office images.

In Photoshop, I cropped it to a square, leaving a little more to the left of the image to allow for the ribbons.  I edited out the stem and the leaves as I felt that these would detract from the text.  I made the background completely white and then added the text. I used one of my favourite fonts (Scriptina) and rotated it onto the diagonal.

One, nice, simple card front!

I then flipped the image as I wanted to print it onto the textured side of the transparency, so I needed a mirror image.

I then printed my image onto the reverse of my OHP, ink jet transparency film.

My card front is 10.5cm x 10.5cm (an A5 card folded and cropped square), so I printed my image 9.5cm x 9.5cm to give a nice border.

I then attached the cut out image to the card with 2 eyelets on the left side -

I then threaded some ribbon through the eyelets and tied it in a bow at the top

and then knotted a few more ribbons underneath the bow



and there you have a really simple professional looking, handmade card - she says modestly!

and whilst I was in 'the zone' I made a few more

Here are a couple of PDFs for you to download -

Mum

and Mom

Images reproduced by permission of Microsoft.

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