Christmas Cards! {Make Your Own 4x8 Template with PicMonkey}

When it comes to Christmas Cards, I'm a bit particular. This year, I was looking for a template that met three qualifications. I wanted a card that said Merry Christmas - not happy holidays or seasons greetings. I wanted at least one small family photo. And since I no longer use facebook, I also wanted a year in review style card to share a few of our family highlights from 2013.

I found it hard to find a template that met all of my specifications, so this year I decided to use the free online photo editing website, PicMonkey, to design my own Christmas Card template.

The internet already has tons of great tutorials to help you get started with PicMonkey, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I thought I'd simply share my design to show that if you can't find a pre-made template that suits your fancy, you can always design your own. And FYI, everything about my card was made with the free PicMonkey version, not the upgraded one.

A basic rundown of my design process.

• Use the custom canvas option and select dimensions. I used 5000 x 2500 which equals a 4x8 sized card with good resolution.
• Overlays - Add your own - the small family photo in the corner.
• Overlays- General - Geometric- Rectangle and pentagon layered to create Family Highlight flag.
• Themes - Winterland and Santa Land for the snowflake and other graphics.
• Basic Edits - Resize to confirm 5000 x 2500 pixel size.
• Save to desktop

Printing

Many photo printing labs force you to use one of their pre-designed templates, but I did find a few places that would allow me to upload and print my complete design. 

The first was Vista Print. Under Holiday tab, click browse all holiday cards. Look for the design your own and click upload your own design. A word of warning though, this site uses a larger margin then one might expect. Because much of my text was located near the borders, some of the words were cropped off. Thankfully, I noticed this before printing, but I share this info with you so that you plan to use this printing service you can design your card appropriately.

Walmart also offers a printing option that will work with custom made templates. It's a little trickier to find, but if you browse 4x8 flat photo cards, the left hand column listing all the themes has a custom collage card option. Click on it and choose one image and no message. It does force you to place a thin border and your uploaded image but I didn't mind. Here is what it looks like after printing.