DIY Holiday Photo Cards

Create your own holiday photo cards with these fun free printables! Two hand-drawn designs ready to have your photo added!

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Good morning! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I am so excited to start posting Christmas crafts! My favorite kind of crafting! I love Christmas and love crafting anything related to the holidays! Today I am sharing DIY Holiday Photo Cards as my first craft in my series “12 Days of Holiday Crafts”.

Last year I had a lot of fun posting a series I called “12 Days of Holiday Crafts“. I’m back again and will be posting 12 new holiday DIY projects between now and Christmas. Some are bigger projects and some are quick and easy – and there will, of course, be some fun free printables and patterns!

On to today’s project – DIY Holiday Photo Cards! I am so excited about these. We usually order our photo cards but this year I was in the mood to make my own. We decided to use a photo of our family taken at the our local zoo’s dinosaur exhibit. All four of us are sitting on top of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is such a funny photo we thought we’d go for it and create a fun cheesy dinosaur card – because why not, right? (The photos I used to photograph these cards for this post are not our family photos. I found these fun stock photos from freedigitalphotos.net).

Below is the tutorial for creating your own photo card. I used Photoshop to design the cards and have included my designs as free printables – on the rare chance you, too, want a dinosaur holiday Card!

More Handmade Holiday Card Projects

How to Make Your Own Holiday Photo Cards

Supplies Needed for DIY Holiday Photo Cards:

Some of the supplies pictured in this tutorial are no longer available for purchase so I have updated them with other options I also have used and like!

Free Printables – Link located at the end of this post :)
Photos
White cardstock (I use 110lb paper but use whatever works best with your printer)
A7 Envelopes
Corner Punch
Glitter Glue
Glue Stick or double-sided tape
Paper Trimmer

Step by Step Tutorial

Step One: Create a card design in Photoshop or print off one of my designs. You can find them in my free Resource Library. The link is at the end of this post. If you are creating a design in Photoshop, size your cards to 5″x7″ so they can print two to a page.

Step Two: Cut out cards using a paper trimmer or scissors. For a nice touch, you can use a corner punch to round the corners of your card. I was excited to do this since I usually don’t pay for the rounded corners when I’ve ordered cards online!

*Update: The photo punch I use now (the link is above under supplies needed) has three different settings so you can choose how subtle your rounded corners are. I think it has a really graceful appearance and is less drastic than the punch I used on these cards.

Step Three: Adhere your photo to the card. I had to trim my photos down to fit the space. I also trimmed the bottom left corner to go around the back of the Brontosaurus. To make this process go a little quicker, I created a template and cut all the bottom left corners off of my cards first. I then adhered them to the card and trimmed the right side of the photo that hung off the edge.

On the holiday wreath card, I needed to cut the photo in a circle. This is easiest with a circle punch if you have one. I used a tape runner to adhere the photos to the cards, which was a quicker way than using a glue stick or double-sided tape.

Step Four: Embellish with glitter glue! I wanted the cards to have a little sparkle but also didn’t want glitter to get on the recipient of our cards. Glitter glue turned out to be perfect and it was really quick! I used a toothpick to pick up any excess glitter glue. I added red glitter to the dinosaur’s hat and the wreath around his neck.

For the wreath card, I added red glitter to all of the berries.

I love how these cards turned out! They were a fun DIY and I love sending handmade cards when I can. It definitely takes time which can be tricky to have during the holiday season. The printables really help the project go a little quicker! Two Christmas movies later and my cards were all set to go :)

What do you think? Do you make your own Holiday cards? Be sure to check out some of my other handmade cards – I have lots of other free printables, patterns and cut files to help you make some truly unique handmade cards!

Download the Free File! This freebie is in my Resource Library under Free Printables, Cards and Gift Tags. Enter your first name and email to get the password to download this file. You’ll also have a chance to sign up for my newsletter to receive fun craft tutorials, tips, updates and more FREE files to help make crafting something special and unique easier!