I recently had a dilemma that could have easily blown up in my face. I knew grandma’s birthday was coming up at the end of the month but here it was days away and it still had to travel 3 states away. Yikes! My real dilemma was that I still didn’t even have a card and I had to mail one pronto! Normally this isn’t a problem. For several years I’ve enjoyed making my own cards more personable with the use of Hallmark’s Greetings Workshop for the PC. Unfortunately, ever since I upgraded my PC a few months ago I haven’t found the CD that I lent my daughter. I now had to find a new way out while still being able to personalize a birthday card with my PC.

I quickly hopped on Google and used the keywords, "free printable birthday cards." Wow! I didn’t realize how many sites there were. After loading up several links and looking around I quickly found out that free could easily mean: 1)bottom of the barrel,  2) only THIS one card free, all others for a fee, 3)Free after a paid yearly subscription, 4) non-personable & generic. Luckily, I am a good gardener and was able to weed through all the undesirables and found a beauty of a site! Ivyjoy cards is a true gem and definitely worth bookmarking!

I had lots of fun browsing through IvyJoy.com and looking at all the different card options they have. You will have many choices for card fronts, message greetings, fonts, colors, backgrounds, and card backs. I thought it was real clever that you could print out a card with a real bar code on the back! Grandma might not even suspect that I didn’t purchase the card. There are also several print options, but I felt the easiest was the one  that I would fold the paper in fourths to put in an envelope I had readily available. I especially liked the printing tips where I quickly learned to turn off printing headers and footers and decrease margins in my web browser. Just reading that saved me lots of frustration! I even found some other goodies on the website worth printing. Gift of Time Certificates, Certificates of Recognition, bookmarks and coloring pages. Each of these also have lots of options and designed to be given from adults and children. How cute would that be give your child a Gift of Time Certificate to stay up late one hour, or a certificate from your child to clean their room without whining! If you haven’t guessed already, the whole IvyJoy experience is truly JOYFUL! (and definitely worth printing out!)

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