Photo Card Greetings in a Snap with My Favorite Things

Combine my love of making cards with my love of taking photographs and you've got a win-win!  Today I'm so excited to share the new Merry Photo Card Frame Die-namics and the Joy Photo Card Frame Die-namics.  These two dies make mass production of your photo cards a total breeze!  I'm in love! 

Both of the Merry Photo card Frame Die-namics and the Joy Photo Card Frame Die-namics will be available as part of the October 8th release at 10pm EST.  Be sure to check the MFT Blog today for lots of information about this month's release! 

The two dies are sold separately, but work the same way, so let's take a peek.  Merry is a horizontally oriented frame, good for those landscape photos.  Joy is designed for a portrait orientation.  Both are designed to fit a standard A2 card front (4 1/4 x 5 1/2)    

To begin, I cut Merry from Steel Grey card stock, and Joy from Paver Red card stock. Then I cut a coordinating matting, measuring 1/8 of an inch larger than the die all around. I'm using the GORGEOUS new Timber Green to coordinate with my Paver Red and the Paver Red to coordinate with my Steel Grey.

If you were going to be mass producing your holiday cards you could make 100 cards using only one package of MFT card stock foryour frame color, one package for your matting color and two packs of whatever color you'd want for your cardbase. 

While you could certainly add on embellishments and extra details, I wanted to show you how just adding the matting, and the frame create the perfect frame and sentiment for your holiday photo.  Because when you're creating holiday cards in bulk you don't want to get too tied up in lots of extra steps. 

Aww. Look how tiny my babies were in this photo!  

This is last year's photo, and I'm already getting excited for getting this year's photo shoot in the backyard.  (I'm sure the boys are NOT excited about this.) 

Now, since a standard photo is 4x6, you'll need to do some cropping and photo trimming to get your image to work within the center of this frame.  I have written a tutorial that explains how to specifically size your photos using Photoshop Elements which you can find here.  I cropped the image to fit within 4.25 x 5 and then trimmed with paper trimmer for a *perfect* fit.   

Tip: To assemble, I recommend applying adhesive to the back of the Merry or Joy photo frame, then laying that over the photo for perfect placement.  Then I adhered that to the coordinating matting. I tried adding the photo to the matting and then overlaying the frame, but I must have been over-served where caffeine is concerned because I found that much trickier and had excess photo hanging over.