Using Only Word & Some Cardstock-Make MAGIC!

In the example below, I made the border by placing a box with a patterned fill underneath the textbox with a white fill. You can do the same thing to make thank you cards-or any card for that matter. This sized card fits perfectly in the “invitation” sized envelopes you can buy at office supply stores.

In Depth Directions:
(I apologize-I had great tutorial pictures, but can’t get Blogger to upload them)

#1 Open a new document in Microsoft Word (or the word processor program of your choice). Chose the “Print Layout” view of the blank page. Make sure your drawing tool bar is visible, usually across the bottom of your screen. If you don’t have the drawing tool bar, then place your mouse on any of the toolbars and click the right mouse button. This will pull up a list of all the available toolbars. Make sure “drawing” has a checkmark next to it. Once you check it off, it will just appear in the middle of the page. Put your mouse on the title bar (where it says “drawing”) and hold down the right mouse button while dragging the box down to the bottom of your screen. It should just pop the tool bar into the bottom when you release the button.

#2 Draw Vertical and Horizontal Guidelines. Select the line drawing tool. Draw a line horizontally completely across your page at the 5 1/2 inch mark on your vertical ruler. Reselect the line drawing tool (it automatically deselects itself after every use) and draw a line vertically across your page at the 3 1/4 mark on the horizontal ruler. Your page should now be divided into 4 boxes.

#3 Print out a test page and actually fold the paper to make sure that my lines are exactly where they should be. Adjust as necessary.

#4 Chose the graphic for the front of your card. Images can be found by doing a Google search for “free clipart” followed by whatever type of image you are looking for. This image came from a Google image search for “princess”.

#5 Copy and paste the image into Word. This immediately puts the picture into the top left hand of the page.

#6 Right click on the picture, chose “format picture”. When the format box pops up chose the “layout” tab.

#7 Chose “in front of text” in the top section and “other” is chosen in the bottom. Then hit “ok”. Now you will be able to move the picture around at will. Right click on the image and drag it over to the top right box on your page.

#8 Next go back to your drawing toolbar and chose your font. I like to use the “WordArt” which is the dark blue “A” on the tool bar. Chose the style of text you want. You can always change the color etc later. Type in what you want, then hit ok.

#9 When your wordart appears you can resize it, use the options to recolor it (by clicking on the “format wordart” option and then choosing “color and lines”), and click on it and drag it to the right spot.

#10 When you’ve got the front of the card looking like you want, you need to “group” the text and the images together. First you need to select multiple items. You do this by holding down the “shift” key as you right click on each item. Then you go back to the drawing toolbar and click on the word draw, scroll up to the top where it says “group” and click. Now all the items you selected will move as a single item.

#11 Now you can “copy” and “paste” the group and then drag it down to make a second card on the same page.

#12 Print a draft copy out (I go into my print options and change to “grayscale” instead of color so I don’t waste the ink-just make sure it is changed back to “color” before you start printing your final copies). When you print, there will pop up a box saying that your printing outside the normal margins. Just hit “ok”. For the most part this doesn’t effect your card, but there is a small white border that will print around the entire page-as far as I know there is no way to get rid of it. If your words or picture are getting cut off by this white border you just need to make them a little smaller or nudge the whole thing a little to the left.

#13 When everything looks good make sure you save the document. Then I like to delete the vertical and horizontal lines totally before printing out the fronts of my cards on card stock. Make sure before you start printing that you have changed your printer options back to “color”.

#14 Next I open a new document, do the vertical and horizontal guidelines in the same way, and type in the text for the inside of my card.

#15 For the inside I use “text boxes” from the drawing toolbar. After I have drawn the textbox in and inserted my text, I highlight the box then right click and chose “format text box”. Under “Colors and Lines” I like to choose “no line” so that there isn’t a visible line around the box. If you want to see an image beneath the text, you need to make sure you pick “no fill” for the fill color. In the case of my example I left the fill white, but took off the line.

#16 To make the patterned border all I did was drew a box using the “box” tool on the drawing toolbar. Once I had a box, I right clicked and chose “format autoshape”. For fill color I chose “fill effects” then I chose the “Pattern Option” and changed the two colors to pink and white. Once I had a big square full of a pattern, I simply placed my white filled text box on top of it so that the only part of the patterned box left showing was a border.

#17 Again I remove my guidelines before printing.

#18 Before you run your pretty new colored card fronts through your printer to add the insides, do a test run with regular paper to make absolutely positively sure that you are running the paper through the printer oriented the correct way. It is very discouraging to find out all your insides are printed upside-down!

#19 These cards (once cut and folded) fit perfectly inside the standard invitation envelopes.

To make thank you cards, you simply change the words on the front of the card to “Thank You” and don’t print out an inside. I make all my own thank yous for myself-I just use wordart to print a nice font and color of “thank you”. I select the “free rotate” tool and rotate my text around so the card opens the other way.

Another option is to make a single layer card, sort of like they do wedding invitations. This is what I did for my SIL baby shower. Each page printed out 4 postcard sized cards that were simply a large blue and white checkerboard boxes, then I printed the text on vellum and cut them to the same size as the checkerboard boxes, punched 2 holes and used ribbon to attach. They looked very fancy and expensive if I do say so myself!