Greetings cards! What a rip-off! £2.50 for a bit of card with a picture on it that cost pennies to print. It’s just wrong! Wrong! As a friend of mine’s granny used to say: “Don’t encourage them in it!”
Indeed, let’s not; let’s make our own instead. It’s easy and costs peanuts. Just think – if you send birthday cards to ten people a year and buy your cards in WH Smith or similar, that’s costing you about £20 to £25 a year; and if you send, say, 30 Xmas cards at 50p each, that’s another £15. Forty quid a year on cards! Nooooooo!
So, in good time for Fathers’ Day (Sunday 21 June, don’t get caught out), let’s make some. I’ve made most of my cards for years by glueing pictures onto card blanks. My cards look so good that friends often frame them and they cost about 10p each including the envelope.
I use photos, bits of decorative wrapping paper, photos of paintings from free magazines, pictures from cards I’ve received, or even pictures cut from cheap, old art books from car boot sales (feels a bit evil but all in a good cause!). You can see a few examples in the picture – the one on the left is made from a bit of wrapping paper; the middle one from an (artistically blurred!) photo, and the one on the right from a picture on a flyer for an exhibition.
I trim the pictures to fit using a craft knife (about £1 but beats scissors for a neat line) and glue them onto card blanks (just the plain ones, without the cut-out windows) using Prittstick-type glue (WH Smith’s own is cheaper). Small packs of card blanks tend to be very expensive on the High Street but you’ll find lots that work out at around 10p per card with envelope on Ebay or elsewhere on the net. Done neatly, you can’t distinguish the cards from commercial ones and they really do cost pennies.
This year I’ve decided to save money by making every single card myself including the ones that I usually can’t find suitable pictures for (cards for men, basically!). Tomorrow I’ll be talking about how to find good photos for your cards (including Fathers Day cards) if you don’t want to take them yourself and how to get the photos printed cheaply.
Money I’ve raised today: £2.50 (that card in the middle is going to be my dad’s Fathers Day card)
Money I’ve raised so far: £130.25
I offer a new moneysaving tip each week and you donate part of any saving direct to biomedical research charities
Grand total raised is £9,657 as of this week; £6,029 MERUK and £3,628 RRF, including all Justgiving pages and offline donations direct to charities. Keep on giving!
0 Responses to “Week 4: The Week of Greetings”