Moo Card Gift Tags

I’m still trying to get used to having a Christmas in the heat instead of the snow (and by “snow” I actually mean grey Pommy drizzle) of the Northern hemisphere, and as such I tend to go a little bit over board at Christmas. I love decorating (with lots of snow themed decorations), shopping for everyone and the novelty that is having cold meat and salad for Christmas lunch in the baking sun before taking a dip in the pool.

I’ve got most of the shopping done (I learned my lesson three years ago about Christmas shopping whilst heavily pregnant, and had no intention of repeating that!) so now it’s just getting on to the final touches. One of the big traditions in my family is the role of “Santa’s Little Helper”, the youngest child in the family reading the gift tags and handing out the presents to everyone. My eldest isn’t quite three yet, we’re lucky if he goes a day without putting a bucket on his head and running into a wall, so reading gift tags was a little out of the question. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks trying to come up with a solution so that we could start this tradition, and it finally clicked to use pictures. I was getting ready to print off a tonne of images and then Dan suggested making things easier by just getting Moo Mini Cards. Genius!

Using Moo is simple. Just a few steps and you’ll have personalised gift tags in no time. I’d thought I’d take you through my process so you can print some out for yourself as well.

First up you’ll need to select your photos. I linked it to my flickr account, but you can also use Facebook and Bebo, or of course just upload from your computer. I selected a couple of pictures of everyone who will be receiving presents, and also several different “Merry Christmas” designs that I threw together in Photoshop using free fonts from AbstractFonts.com.

Feel free to click on the above images to go to their flickr page and download the full size so you can use them on your own cards, they’re already formatted for use on minicards, or print them out heavy stock to use as homemade gift tags. I intend on teaming up a picture card with a Merry Christmas on each gift – I don’t tend to go for traditionally festive colours, so you’re welcome to recolour them to suit your decorations and wrapping paper better.

If you’re using NEW Mini Cards (as opposed to the business card option) you’ll need to remember that they’ll be cropped into a letterbox, so you want a clear photo, with a fairly high resolution. You can either use Moo’s format guides to help you size your photos or…

Use their super handy crop tool. With this I could focus in on people in the pictures so that Declan could recognise them easily. As you can see, you can rotate and scale the photos to fit into exactly what you want, they’ll even give you a warning if the resolution is too low for a quality print.

Step three is the back of your card, you can either use an uploaded image, text, or a combination of the two. A family photo would be awesome here, but as I struggle to get both of the boys to sit next to each other for a photo, let alone all four of us, I instead made up another text image in Photoshop and uploaded that. Remember that unlike the front of your cards where you can use up to 100 different images, the back can only feature one design.

And you’re done designing, follow the steps to pay and send your cards for printing, and don’t forget you have two hours after you hit the confirm button to make any last minute changes.

Moo says to allow two weeks for delivery, particularly around the Christmas season, I’ve had excellent results with previous orders arriving to Australia in a week or so, but this is certainly not something to leave till the last minute.

When my cards arrive I’ll post some pictures to show how I’ve used them in the wrapping. I’m so excited to bring one of my childhood traditions to my own children.