Resourceful Photo Scrap Note Cards

** UPDATE: Don't forget to enter to win my awesome handmade note card giveaway!  Entries are open until 8 p.m. on Monday, August 1.  There are up to six ways to enter! **

You might remember from other posts that I value resourcefulness and keep odds and ends that might be useful for future crafts.  Like the faux leather box for my accordion photo box gift for Father’s Day or glass jars for my leaf decoupaged jars.  So it should be no surprise that I save scraps of paper leftover from scrapbooking and other paper crafts and the edges I trim off photographs.  I also save interesting pieces of product boxes.  Here’s a look into my scrap drawer:

Someday I'm sure I’ll know someone who’d like a Hello Kitty note card!  See all the photo scraps?  Those are leftover from my accordion photo box, and they were the inspiration for a series of note cards I just made.

I arranged the photo scraps into categories based on subject matter.

 

The setting sun on these fence posts was my favorite grouping. 

I then dug around through my bigger scraps to find paper for layering and the paper that will be the note card itself.  It turned out that I had to use a new sheet of paper for the card, because the note cards came out on the big side.

I’m no longer a fan of measuring for projects like these.  My strategy for getting even cuts is to glue down the photo and then [carefully] make the cuts.

After I matted my three photo scraps….

 I glued them down onto a large piece of scrapbooking paper and then trimmed it down to size.

Gah!  My handwriting is so terrible.


And then I made another!  One was for my friend’s son’s first birthday (I wrote about his awesome animal-themed party yesterday, in case you missed it) and the other is for Betsy, who is the brains behind the knit for Japan effort on Small Things.

If you plan on making note cards to put in the mail, you’ll probably want to plant your card to be a specific envelope size, or just make your own custom envelope.

Phoenix’s card was hand-delivered, and Betsy’s card was snuggled in with my knitted items for those who lost everything in Japan’s recent earthquake and tsunami.

In this information age, I’ll never stop reading printed books or sending paper cards in lieu of electronic mail.  I just love how these resourceful photo scrap note cards turned out!