Make a Greeting Card From Scraps

Have you ever felt ordinary greeting cards were, well, pretty ordinary? Why not whip up some greeting cards of your own? It's easy, and you can be sure they'll be one of a kind.

This is a card I made one day when I was looking for a project that wouldn't take hours to create. I started with a blank white note card by Strathmore, and a slightly smaller piece of acid free black card stock to act as a background for the collage pieces.

On my work table was a page torn from an old phone book. I had used it under another project to protect the table top, and I liked the red paint marks on it. So I included it in the collage. The rest of the elements are bits of paper and numbers and letters I had snipped from various sources. (Magazines and junk mail yield lots of them.) A good quality glue stick was my adhesive.

The bumpy looking white circle is actually part of a label from a plastic soft drink bottle to which I had applied heat. This caused the plastic to shrink up and form puckers. The textural quality it adds gives the design extra interest, I think.

All of the components of this little collage were bits and pieces of things I already had on hand. It came together very quickly (in about the same amount of time it has taken me to write this post.) The recipient loved it and said she was going to frame it.

There's no need to buy special supplies for making cards like these. The"ingredients" are all around you. Pull out your scissors, grab some old flyers or magazines, and see what you can come up with. You'll end up with a unique little art piece to give someone, while honing your compositional skills and flexing your imagination. So have some fun! Create!

Text and image ©2014 Lynn Edwards