I love to make my own cards for each occasion. Sometimes I can’t find an excuse, so I make a card anyway and send it to one of my friends! The mini-matte cards are a great way to use those bits and pieces of photos that you’ve used for other craft projects.

Materials Needed:
MiniMattes
6-1/2 x5 inch card white card stock
Adobe Photoshop Elements

Instructions:

1. Open your Photoshop Elements and select File>New.

Put 6 inches for width and 4.5 inches for height (this is for a horizontal card – if you want a vertical card, just reverse).

Set the Resolution to 150 and the Mode should default to RGB Color. White.

2. Next we need to put a color in the background, so look at your tool box on the left hand side – See the black and white squares at the bottom? These are your default colors (You can reset the default colors by hitting the “D” key anytime and the “X” key will toggle the two squares).

Double click on the black square and a dialog box with colors will open up. Select your background color and click OK. Now the green color is on top of my color boxes in the tool box.

3. Hold down your Alt (Option key on Mac) key and press the Backspace key – this will fill your background for you.

4. Let’s add a nice frame around the edge of the background color. In Elements, this is easy! Look at your top and find the file tab for Effects. Click the tab and a menu will open, select Frames. Select a frame style (I use Strokes) and click apply.

5. You can print your card now or add some text if you wish.

To add text, just select a color for the text just like we selected the background color in Step 2. Or if you wish, you can do a clever trick to find just the perfect color:

Open your image you are going to put into your frame. Now select the color picker from your toolbox (it looks like an eyedropper).

Click it on an area of the image you wish to copy the color from. It will copy the color to your toolbox squares and you will have a perfect match! (You can use this for the background also!)

6. Select the Text tool in the tool box (it looks like a capitol T) and then select your font and type away!

7. If you want to slant your text as I did, highlight the text and press Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) and the “T” key. This will open the free transform tool and you and move your text, distort it and all kinds of interesting things.

8. Once you are ready to print, select Layer> Flatten layers and save your file.

9. Select Image>Rotate and rotate your image 180 degrees, turning it upside down.

10. Select Print>Print Preview to open the dialog box. Unclick the Center Image button and put .2 in the Top position and .125 in the Left position. This will move the image over to the top left corner. Click print and your image will come out centered on the background.

11. Finally, all that’s left is to peel and stick my Mini-Matte. I find it’s easy to trim my photo, stick it to the Mini-Matte and then position and stick the Mini-Matte.

Some more ideas? Use the Mini-Mattes in your journals and scrapbooks. How about kitchen magnets? School notebooks?

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