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Spending the time to make your own birthday cards for your friends and family is a good way to show them that you care. Follow these tips to get started.
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Choose a card theme. Think about the person who you are making the birthday card for. Do they have a favorite color, animal, sport or activity? Try to focus your birthday card around that.
Gather card making material. Bring together all the different kinds of paper you can find in your home, different colored pens and pencils, stickers, stencils, stamps, ribbon, fabric, buttons and anything else you can think might be fun to use on a card that go along with the theme you chose.
Make sure to select card stock or poster board to be the actual card. You can cut paper down to the size that you want your card to be and fold it in half.
It is important to find glue and scissors as well. Sometimes it is fun to include pictures on the card that you took either of your family, you and the loved one who will be receiving the card, or an animal or landscape.
Design your card. Make sure not to glue anything in place until you have designed the entire outside of the card. Place pieces of ribbon, buttons, photos and different cut out shapes of paper in an array on the front of the card. Once you are happy with the way it looks, glue everything in place.
Cut or draw the words “Happy Birthday!” Select paper or a material (such as cardboard, card stock, fabric or even tinfoil) that you would like the words Happy Birthday to be written on or cut out of. It is often fun to cut each letter out from a different color or type of material. Once you have the letters for Happy Birthday, strategically place them on front or inside the card and glue them where you would like them to be.
Make an envelope. You can make your own birthday card envelope with newspaper or construction paper. Place your finished birthday card on the paper that you will use to make an envelope and lightly trace around it with a pencil. Remove the birthday card and place your finger on one of the lines that you traced and mark a dot with a pencil so that you have a dot a finger length outside of the traced line.
Fold the paper that you traced on in half on the finger dot that you marked with the trace lines facing out. Measure and mark dots 1 inch off of the two side trace lines and mark two dots 2-3 inches up off the top trace line. Line a ruler up to the lines on a side of the traced birthday card and trace a second line from one end of the paper to another. Do this to each side of the card and then cut around the outside lines. Fold and glue the sides over, leaving the top open. Slip the card into the envelope and either tape the top closed or fold the top flap inside the envelope.
Now you have made your own birthday card and envelope that can be sent in the mail!
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