Ideas for Homemade Greeting Cards

• A homemade greeting card allows you to say it from your heart. Indeed/Photodisc/Getty Images

  Making your own greeting card takes the essence of what you want to say away from big business and places it directly over your heart. It's not difficult to create your own greeting cards, and you can have a lot of fun with the crafts and project ideas that go into making them. Don't pay for some guy in a factory to tell a loved one how you feel about him. Show him with the time you spend creating a truly unique and one-of-a-kind homemade greeting card.

Polaroid Emulsion Lift Card

• A Polaroid camera, water, contact paper and spray enamel are just a few of the tools needed to lift an image right off the film and transport it to your own greeting card. The process is called an emulsion lift and with it you can literally lift an image out of the water and transfer it to the paper. From that point on, you can add special effects to age or colorize the image and then write a meaningful greeting on the inside.

Abstract Images

• You can create an abstract image for the cover of your greeting card with not much more than wax, an iron, a heat gun and card stock. Melt the wax with the iron and create patterns in the wax with the heat gun or a blow dryer. Create just one image to place on the cover or a collection of small images.

One-Word Greeting

• If you have a greeting to say that can be summed up in one word, make it the centerpiece of your card. Make a photocopy of your one-word greeting---anything from "Sorry" to "Congratulations"---and then cut out the word. Paste or glue the cutout to the front of a blank folded piece of card stock so the recipient immediately gets the message without even having to open the card. You can add a bit more information on the inside of the card, or just leave it blank and let the boldly fonted letters on the front say it all for you.

Comic Book Art

• Artist Roy Lichtenstein made a career out of taking comic book art, resizing them to large proportions and making an ironic comment on the state of popular art. You can take a page right out of the comic book to create a greeting card sentiment. Buy a few comic books, flip through them until you find a panel that is representative of the greeting you want to pass on to the recipient, and glue it onto the cover of plain card stock. If you can find another panel that acts as a commentary upon the cover, even better.