how to make greeting card

You'll need: Paper grocery bags (one bag makes up to 12 4x6 sheets) Scissors and/or paper cutter Ruler Pencil Inkjet printer Thin cardboard (like cereal boxes) or recycled greeting cards Glue stick or two-sided tape (not necessary for the machine-sewn version) Your choice of decorating materials (thread, embroidery floss, yarn, ribbon, hole punch, needle, buttons, sewing machine, etc.) I cut my grocery bag paper down to 4x6-inch sheets for printing—I've tried printing on 8.5x11 sheets, but because there are always creases, bends, and imperfections in the recycled paper, the bigger the sheet is, the more chance of it getting offset, bent, or otherwise messed up in the printer. The 4x6 sheets almost always print up fine, as long as you smooth out bends and creases as much as possible. Start by cutting your bags along the corners, so you have two big sheets from the front and back and two narrow sheets from the sides. Most bags are exactly 12 inches across, so if you cut straight along the sides, you should be able to measure and cut right down the middle for two 6-inch strips. Then use your ruler and pencil to measure and mark 4-inch sections—you should have a couple inches left unused, so if one side is more bent/crushed, then don't use that side. Cut your 4x6-inch sheets very carefully and straight, so they'll feed into your printer without problems. Once you cut up all your sheets, you'll have a stack of usable recycled paper to print on! If some sheets are extra bent up, you can use an iron to smooth them a bit—just set it high, with no steam, and go over the back (no printing) side until it's smooth. (That won't get rid of creases, but it should make them smooth enough to print on.) Load the sheets into your printer just as you would 4x6 photo paper (make sure the blank sides are facing the right way).As for what to print, as is the case with normal white paper, photos with lots of detail will not look their best printed on non-photo paper. I recommend printing either graphic images (solid colors, clear lines, no/little shading, or small details) or plain text. In the photo below, you can see part of a regular photo I printed, with a dark blue background color, which came out a bit faded and not very sharp. So, I edited that same photo to inverse it (make it the negative image) and raise the contrast, so it's an almost blank background now. Also, I have a photo printer, so photographic images still print out pretty well even on the brown paper; if you have a non-photo printer, you'll probably want to stick to simple graphic images and text only. Set your printer settings to 4x6 size, plain paper, to print on the recycled bag paper. Now that you have your card images, you can make your actual cards. You can trim the edges off the printed pages if you want, to make the images bleed to the edges, or trim off any bent corners. Cut pieces of cereal-box-type cardboard to size, as wide as your printed page and twice as tall. Choose if you want to add a little for a border, like mine below, or cut it exactly to size. Then score across the center of the cardboard piece to make a clean crease—mark the exact center on each side, hold the ruler down connecting the marks, and run your scissors blade lightly across. Now when you fold the cardboard, it should crease neatly along the line. Glue or tape the image centered on the card front. Next, you'll need to cover up the inside so you can write in your card. Cut a piece of bag paper (or white paper or any other paper you want to use) to size and glue it inside. If you are making a bunch of cards, such as thank-you's for wedding gifts for example, then you could stop here and be done (hand-embroidering every single card would take forever!). Press the glued card(s) under heavy books overnight for security, or you could use two-sided tape instead if you prefer. But if you are making one special card, you can continue along with me and stitch it up! In this case, the glue is just to hold the papers in place while you stitch, so it doesn't need to be pressed and dry. You could cut the inside paper smaller, and the box picture will create a colored border, if you like. Next, I stitched borders around each side, both as decoration and to fasten the paper to the cardboard, using a strong needle, regular embroidery floss, and a running stitch. In the image below, the arrows show how I worked around the sides, using only one strand of floss, starting and ending in the same corner so I could tie the ends into a bow. I used one long strand of floss to avoid unnecessary knots inside the card.