Some holidays are just around the corner and the stores are full of merchandise that you can buy to celebrate them. Every year, it seems like every holiday has a few new items that invite you to ditch your money. Not to envy retailers for the way they make a living, but families need to keep an eye on their bottom line as well. A great way to introduce some creativity into your vacation in a budget-conscious way is to go online to search for many of the ideas and printables found there.
Printables for every occasion are available for little to no cost, except the price of your own printer’s ink and paper. Planning a Christmas party? You can print personalized invitations and envelopes, wrapping paper, and gift tags. For party decoration, you can print napkin rings, place cards, banners, garlands, party favors and gift bags. Many decoration motifs available in a printable invitation or coloring page can be adapted to a centerpiece by mounting on sticks and adding other traditional centerpieces such as fresh or dried flowers, branches, leaves, fruits, candy, ribbons, or any number of things. Printable games like bingo, puzzles, and activity sheets can also be used to break the ice at a party.
Do you love to do crafts? Scrapbooking is one of the best forms of crafting today. You can find printable scrapbook supplies on the Internet in the form of free printable pages for backgrounds, borders, frames, alphabets, journaling aids, ‘die cuts’ and clipart. Make sure to load your printer with acid-free paper and you’ll be on your way to adding all kinds of creative and colorful embellishments to your holiday scrapbook pages or pages anytime.
Kids love to get into any Christmas mood with kids-only printables. Coloring pages are the easiest and most prolific to print of children’s parties and are available by the hundreds on almost every topic of interest to children besides the holidays: animals, cartoon characters, fantasy, outer space, dinosaurs, transportation, stations and educational themes. how to learn their alphabet. Christmas coloring pages for kids can be turned into a Christmas greeting card, a gift, or even a wrapping paper or ornament. Children love to decorate their windows for the holidays, so you can try the following crafts. Print out a coloring page and ask your child to color it with markers. Very lightly brush the page with vegetable oil and pat dry with a paper towel. Glue the picture inside a homemade construction paper frame and hang it on a sunny window. This treatment gives the coloring page a translucent “stained window” quality.
Another fun thing you can do with a Christmas printable is to make your own custom stickers. Start with any printable clip art or graphic or even your own photos. Use your favorite word processing or editing program and full-size label paper. Avery is a popular label paper brand, but any brand will do. Just set up a full page of the images you want for your stickers and print them on your label paper. Let the ink dry completely and then cut it into individual stickers. If you like your stickers a bit more moisture-proof, you can spray them with a couple of light coats of clear acrylic spray before cutting. Another option would be to print your designs on plain paper and then use a copier to copy them onto the label paper. This second option will be the most resistant to moisture.
If you’ve never taken a look at what’s available on the internet before, do it before your next vacation. Anything that comes off paper is possibly a free print available to you. Even some things that you don’t normally think of in print may be available, because there are some very original and clever ideas out there, if you look. For creativity and the economy, printing your own Christmas supplies is the way to go.