Handmade Greeting Cards

What do you do with old greeting cards?

I love receiving greeting cards and really do hate having to put them away after a birthday or special celebration.  I usually left them on the hutch for a couple of weeks after the event and then they would get bundled up and shoved in a draw.

I could never think of throwing them out.  Each card has a little sentimental value, in that someone picked that card out for me and wrote a personal message inside, for me.

It doesn’t take long for the draw to end up packed with greeting cards, so I decided the best way to solve the packed draw issue was to create a scrapbook with all the cards.  This solved a couple of issues for me – I reclaimed a drawer in the hutch and didn’t feel like I was being a hoarder.

You can use any book to create a greeting card scrapboo, it doesn’t have to be a large sized book, you can use a smaller journal size album.  The perfect type of book to use is a spiral bound book as this will give a little more flexibility when turning pages as your greeting card albums fills up.  Or a binder where you can add more pages when needed.

You can also add more to your scrapbook than just greeting cards.  A quick internet search and you will find heaps of free background images that you can print off.  Cut them to the size of your album page and  stick them down with a glue stick or double sided tape to the album page.

Plus, $2 shops and the cheap discount stores have heaps of embellishments that are made for scrapbooking that you can also add to the page you put the card on – flowers, wooden embellishments of little animals, keys, in fact, pretty much anything you can think of.  Lace is one of my favourite things to use on a card page, especially against a vintage background.

scrapbook backgrounds
scrapbook background

When adding your greeting cards to your album, you can:

  • make separate categories for your cards, like birthday, christmas, anniversary etc
  • Add them by date
  • Separate categories for who the cards are for
  • or just add them in as they come

Saving your greeting cards in a scrapbook or album creates your own little time capsule, with the difference being, that you don’t have to dig it up to look at it, it is there for you to go through at your leisure.

I always love it when a special occasion is over, I grab the album and find myself reading back and checking out cards that have been sent years before.

I often wonder if any of my friends, I send greeting cards to, do the same and keep their cards.

Handpress Cards are their own little piece of artwork and when we are posting our cards out, there is always a little wish that the card is kept by the recipient because it is special to them.

personalised greeting cards
Handmade gift tags

Recycle Your Greeting Cards

If you are not into saving your greeting cards, why not recycle them into gift tags.  Find a template and trace it out on the card.  Most greeting cards have a white  or plain background at the back of the facing page, so this makes a perfect gift tag.  Use a hole punch to add  the hole in the top of the tag and coloured twine to attach the tag.  Check out your local cheapie shops for twine.  And, same as creating an album or scrapbook for your cards, you can also add embellishments to the gift tags.

gift tag template

A quick internet search will bring up many different tag shapes with free templates.  Just print out the template, cut around it, lay it on your card, trace it then cut the tag out of the card.

Keep your Greeting Cards online

If space is an issue, why not scan your cards and create an online album or store the scanned images in the cloud.  Google Drive is a perfect place to store images.  In Drive you can create folders for different occasions and store the scanned cards in the relevant folder.

Which ever method you chose, looking back over your greeting cards will bring back many memories of that special day or occasion.  It is always a nice reminder to remember that people thought about you and sent you a tangible greeting.

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