Christmas Fun Using Handmade Text Paper

by Nora Noll (Nov 21, 2012)

One of the fun things about Christmas is making homemade gifts. A fun way to take the gift a step further is to design your own packaging, tag and card for that special someone.

Today I am going to show you how to design your own patterned paper using text, which you can then use in creating all three.

There are many techniques for how to create your own text-patterned paper. I have seen beautiful stamped backgrounds and papers created in Adobe Photoshop but the easiest way to create a typographic background is to use a word processing program. For my examples I have used Microsoft Word.

The first thing to do is open a new document. Then go to format>document and change the margins so that you can fit as much type on an 8 ½" x 11" piece of paper as you can.

The third step is to pick what type of font you want to use and start typing a sentiment. I used the simple phrase "Wishing You a Merry Christmas" because I wanted to use this paper over and over. Type (or copy and paste) until you have three lines.

Next, copy and paste the three lines of text until the whole page is filled.

Now comes the fun part. Throughout the document, randomly change the font type of some of the sentiments. If you want, you can even change the size of the font. Then, randomly change the color of some of your sentiments. In my example, I chose to keep the font size the same with each type I chose, but I bolded some of the phrases and left some normal throughout the document. I also used two different colors to highlight the text arbitrarily.

This technique is so easy and can be used for birthdays, Easter, Thanksgiving, or any special occasion that might come up. I hope that this article will encourage you to make your own!

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