Design Your Own Christmas Card and Silhouette Address Labels

I love using Shutterfly to make our annual Christmas card.  For the last few years we have taken our Christmas card picture in front of our house with the camera set up on a tripod.  This year I went through every page of Christmas cards on Shutterfly and couldn't find one that was exactly what I wanted and then I saw that you could upload your own.  That was really appealing to me so I opened up Pixelmator (my photo editing software) and got to work.

I started by opening up a canvas with the size of Christmas card that I wanted.  I then opened our photo in a different window and resized the image and copied and pasted it onto my Christmas card canvas.

I knew that I wanted a chalkboard look so I googled chalkboard background, found one that I liked, and dragged it to my computer desktop.  I then opened the image on my Christmas card canvas and adjusted the image size until I got the right look next to our photo.  I used a mix of fonts that I have on my computer.  The floral images were a purchased item which you can find here.  Once I got everything to look like I wanted it on the card, I saved the image as a JPEG and uploaded it to Shutterfly.  It was that easy folks, I'm not kidding!  I am excited to design more cards of my own in the future!

Once the cards arrived my next task was to create some address labels using my Silhouette.

As you can see, I put registration marks on the page so that I could use the Silhouette's print and cut feature.  Originally I planned on just buying some white sticker paper for these labels but Michaels was out so I decided to buy the printable silver foil instead.  I was skeptical of how it would work in the printer but it worked fabulously.  I set my printer to glossy photo paper just because I thought it would help it to print properly.

Once the labels printed I put the sheet on my Silhouette cutting mat and loaded it into the machine. Before sending the design to cut I made sure to select all the labels and set them to cut outside edge in the cut settings window. This is an important step, otherwise all of the designs and letters will be cut out too.  Once you send the design to the Silhouette it will start by reading the registration marks and then it will cut all the labels perfectly.  It is so easy!

I love how the labels turned out!  It was exciting to send out Christmas cards that were so personalized this year!  Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!