Making Valentine's Cards Using Clip Art

Valentine's Day truly is a "homemade" holiday in our house. Not only am I making some gifts, but I'm also making Valentine's cards, using free clip art. Clip art really makes card-making easy. As with other projects, I am using clip art from Graphic's Fairy. My Mac came preloaded with the apple word-processing program Pages. I also have MSWord on my laptop. However, I find pages is easier to manipulate images and transpose type over images. So, whenever I am using clip art, I choose Pages for my creating.

Things that Pages can do with which I have difficulty when using Word:

• duplicate images rapidly to create all-over patterns
• flip images vertically and horizontally, then adjust the angle of the image (for placing images on a diagonal)
• provide guidelines for placement of images
• overlay text on images without using a photo editor
• easily move images around without the text or other images jumping out of placement

Here are two Valentine's Day cards that I made using Pages. I used a combination of clip art, simple frames available on Pages, and text available on Pages. 

On the left, the filigree heart is a frame from Graphic's Fairy, and the roses are from Graphic's Fairy as well. I overlaid a text box to include the greeting. The shadow frame around the composition is an option on Pages. The floral bouquets are from 2 images. I duplicated and flipped each to obtain a mirror image effect. I also adjusted the angle on the floral images to suit my composition.

On the right, The retro heart and smaller heart pairs are images from Graphic's Fairy. I added the greeting banner using a text box with white fill, overlaying the message on the heart image. I adjusted the angle of the greeting with a simple Pages feature. The pair of hearts were plain, so I overlaid a text box with the message "You + Me" in white text. The large heart is surrounded with a simple frame available on Pages.

At the top of the full sheet is a custom "made by" emblem. I used images from the cards and text to create this. Pages allowed me to flip the text and small image upside down, so that once the card was folded, the "made by" emblem would be right-side-up.

The nitty-gritty. I was able to print 2 cards on 1 sheet of paper, using landscape orientation and cutting the sheet in half after printing. I only have black ink, so my cards are black and white. I had 1 print out that I thought needed adjustments before a final copy, meaning I printed 2 sheets. So, my copies were 3 cents each (paper and ink), or 6 cents total. That's 3 cents per Valentine's Day card. If I decide to make more of the same cards, then those Valentine cards drops to 1 and 1/2 cents per card.

A little project that I really enjoyed making, and it saved me some money.

Saving Money on Meals on Traveling Days

This is nothing new, but I am grateful that I was able to make some advance preparations before a very long day this past Saturday. This was the day of the burial service for my FIL, which was held out-of-state. I knew that the day would be long, and therefore, I spent a good part of Friday preparing all of our meals for Saturday. We brought our breakfast and lunch with us in the car, and had a dinner ready to be heated when we walked back in our own door, late in the evening. It all worked out well. With the exception of a package of English muffins, I made all of our meals with what we had on hand.

For breakfast, I made breakfast sandwiches, using eggs, the last 2 patties of sausage, turkey bacon, cheese, and English muffins. I chopped the cooked sausage and turkey bacon and added both to the eggs, cooked omelet style (not scrambled in the pan), so as to divvy up the breakfast meat between 4 sandwiches. I wrapped the sandwiches individually; then, in the morning we heated them just before leaving, to eat on the drive down. With the breakfast sandwiches, we had tangerines, coffee, and juice.

For a midday meal, one of my daughters helped me put together a substantial lunch for all of us, which included sandwiches, apples, celery sticks, crackers, raisins, peanuts, and cookies. And finally, for dinner, I had made pizza from scratch on Friday. So I simply doubled the recipe and made 2 pizzas. It was just after 8 PM when we walked back in the door after a grueling drive, so I sliced and heated the pizza and served with juice for a quick dinner.

Preparing all of our meals in advance saved time (no stopping at restaurants along the way*, or once back in town) and money (I figure we saved about $35 by packing all of our own food).

I add the * as we did make one stop just before getting back on the highway to come home. The cemetery did not have bathroom facilities available, and we wanted to use clean restrooms before getting on the road and eating our lunches in the car. So, we stopped at McDonalds. Using the app on my daughter's phone, we bought a medium-sized order of fries for $1 (no tax, as this was in Oregon) after using their restrooms. We also received free cups of water to drink in the car along with our packed-lunch.

My usual immediate thought, when planning for such a long day, is to plan to eat lunch out and pick up a quick dinner as we drive back into town. On this blog, we have talked a lot about bringing our own food and beverages with us for long days in the car. I am often inspired by all of you and your efforts to save some money by preparing in advance. For this occasion, I used you all as my inspiration to make these meal preparations z day ahead, so our family could save both time and money. My sincere thanks to all of you for inspiring me to do better!