Personalised Christmas cards and voucher giveaway

We’ve been creative and made our own personalised Christmas photo cards this year. Firstly I took some festive photographs of the boys and then chose the following two shots to use for our Christmas cards.

I uploaded these to Snapfish who have given me a free £25 voucher for the purpose of this review. I already have an account with Snapfish, as I have reviewed their products previously for both Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day.

But I recall that it was very simple to set up an account with Snapfish and it is also easy to upload photos.

Then comes the more time-consuming part, namely choosing your Christmas card designs as there is a huge range, over 1200 of them. Of course, you can do this quickly by limiting your selection to what you see on the first page, but I wanted to browse around a bit. There are plenty of filters to narrow your choice such as how many images you want on your card, orientation and colour. You can also narrow down by size and flat or folded card, but bizarrely I couldn’t find a way of combining this with the other filter.

I had already decided that I wanted folded cards using one image per card. I also wanted minimal text on the inside, as I intended to write my own greetings inside. So this is what I chose, both in size 7×5″.

The cards cost £1.25 each because I bulk-ordered 20 cards. The pricing is on a sliding scale, which currently ranges from £1.99 for an individual card down to 75p for 100+ cards.

The cards arrived quickly, well before the estimated delivery date and were well packed. They looked great, nice and glossy.  Also 15p of the purchase price of each card goes to Macmillan Cancer Support.

I am very happy with my Snapfish personalised photo Christmas cards and recommend that you take a look. They also do a wide range of other personalised products including Christmas baubles. Please note that the last order date for Christmas is 20th December.

And I’m hosting a rafflecopter competition to giveaway a £25 Snapfish voucher to one lucky winner. What a great prize.

a Rafflecopter giveaway – Please click on the link to enter.

And you may see my other giveaways here.

I’d love to hear what you would choose from Snapfish?

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Disclosure.  I received a voucher to purchase items from Snapfish.  All opinions are my own.

The tasty alternative to a greetings card plus giveaway

I’ve reached the reminder in my list that says to buy Christmas cards. I have to say I buy much fewer of these now than I used to, mostly just for the boys to send to their school friends. Beyond that I tend to mainly send charity e-cards or I prefer to do something a little bit more memorable for close family and friends.

So I was interested to hear about Morse Toad Messaging which is a tasty alternative to a greetings card. They specialise in putting a smile on someone’s face with a surprise personalised chocolate delivery. And they gave me a free £10 voucher to spend on their website.

I showed the website to the boys and they wanted to surprise their dad with one. We decided to  stick with the seasonal theme, but as it is far too early to have a Christmassy house, we just dug out their Christmas hats for a photo, ready to personalise their gift.

They chose the “Best Dad in the World” wording which currently retails at £12.50. We wrote a personalised message to be printed on the reverse of the card insert. And I uploaded their photo for the front of the card which cost an additional £1. Or there were a few free images of Morse Toad in his top hat that you can choose from instead of uploading your own image. All told, the ordering process was very quick and simple. And shipping is free for all UK orders over £5.

Alternatively you can personalise the wording for your chocolate. There are 11 character spaces per row and you may have up to 4 rows.

The service was very quick. I placed the order in the evening and had an email the next afternoon to say it had been dispatched. Two days later it arrived. It was well packed and is letterbox size.

Doesn’t that look fantastic, full of tasty Belgian chocolate? Wouldn’t you just love to give or receive one of these?

Plus I’m hosting a rafflecopter competition to giveaway a £15 voucher to spend at Morse Toad Messaging. So the lucky winner gets to choose how to spend their prize. Open worldwide.

And I have an offer to pass on to my readers – 10% off your order at Morse Toad Messaging with discount code: “YABMummy” (expires Christmas Day).
.

a Rafflecopter giveaway – Please click on the link to enter.

And you may see my other giveaways here.

I’d love to hear who you would like to give a Morse Toad chocolate message to and for what occasion?

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Disclosure. I received a £10 voucher towards purchasing goods from Morse Toad. All opinions are my own.

Valentine’s Day personalised gift ideas

There is nothing like a personalised gift to say “I love You”, so with Valentine’s Day fast approaching, I was pleased to get the opportunity to purchase some free gifts from Snapfish.

Now in our household, the boys don’t like being left out of any special day, so I said they could each choose something for themselves, as well as joint gift from the three of us to their Dad. Son1 decided he would like a t-shirt and he took a photo of one of his favourite characters from Super Mario on the TV screen. Once his image was uploaded to Snapfish, he added some text and a celebration border.

Meanwhile son2 remembered how they had both designed notebooks for Father’s Day last year and wanted to make one featuring his most loved teddy. I recommended he take his photo in portrait format, based on finding out last time that very few of the designs worked well with landscape images.

Then on to the gift for Dad. I was thinking along the lines of creating a photobook with snapshots of our favourite family memories. However I was overruled by the boys who decided he should have large fridge magnets. And that these should feature the photos they had taken rather than family shots. Do I have a sneaky feeling that Dad is only going to be the owner of the magnets for a very short time, before ownership is changed.

However they did let me take responsibility for designing a Valentine’s Day card, so I chose an image of the three of us for him on a square card. This did take some effort as there was a huge choice of almost 500 designs, which I admit that I didn’t look at them all. After looking at the first few pages, I stopped and did a search for the word “We” instead which returned 12 results. And finally I spent the last of our credit on a few extra photo prints.

Despatch was very prompt and everything was well packed. I was very pleased with all our items apart from one thing. Son1’s t-shirt is enormous. Not the size we ordered. And even more surprisingly, an age 12-14 size that didn’t even exist on the product order page, older than all the options available. Work that one out if you can!

Finally the prices paid. The t-shirt was £7.99, the notebook was £5.99, the magnets were £3.99 each and the card was £2.29, so all good value in my opinion.

You can find Snapfish on social media as follows:-
Facebook | Twitter

I’d love to hear what you would choose from Snapfish?

Visit Yet Another Blogging Mummy on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram

Disclosure.  I received a voucher to purchase items from Snapfish.  All opinions are my own.

3d Decoupage Advent project plus crafting giveaway

Counting down the days until December, it is time for my latest craft project – a 3d decoupage advent calendar card kit which I received free to review from docrafts. I was very pleased to receive this as making 3d decoupage pictures and cards used to be one of my favourite hobbies before the boys were born. I still have a drawer full of prints waiting for me to find time to do more crafting.

The docrafts website has loads of creative inspiration for crafting projects, plus a wide range of products for sale. It also has a busy crafting forum. Do take a look.

This kit contained an A5 size preprinted card, 3 die-cut sheets, a preprinted paper, 2 card extensions and an expandable envelope. There were some very small font instructions on the reverse of the pack, too small for me to read easily, but it seemed fairly obvious what I needed to do.

I pressed out the numbers and images to go behind the windows, plus an embellishment for the front. Mostly very easy to press out but there were a couple that I had to tidy the edge slightly with scissors. Then I used double sticky pads that I already had in my crafting stash to build up the layers, although I would have expected the kit to have contained these. There were additional smaller numberless baubles but I chose not to use these. I also didn’t use the preprinted paper, but this could have gone inside the card as an insert for you to personalise with a greeting message.

I then folded the card extensions and glued them on to the card. And finally glued the front onto the card extensions. I’m not convinced I did this stage correctly as although my finished advent calendar looked fabulous, it was far too thick to possibly even fit into an extending envelope.

Afterwards I used a magnifying glass to study the instructions, but they were fairly minimal and didn’t give a detailed explanation of how to fold and stick the card extensions.

In summary, a lovely craft kit, but more detailed larger instructions would be helpful. It didn’t take very long to make. The kit also suggested that you could personalise it with your own photographs. A nice touch but it would take some effort printing them to such a small size to fit the windows.

This kit is available to purchase from docrafts for £3. An excellent price for a nice little craft project.

And I’m hosting a rafflecopter competition to giveaway a crafting activity goody bag courtesy of docrafts to one lucky winner. I’ve been sent one as a thank you gift and can assure you that it will be a lovely prize. Contents are worth over £18 but this retails at just £9.95 currently.

a Rafflecopter giveaway – Please click on the link to enter.

And you may see my other giveaways here.

I’d love to hear about your craft projects.

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Disclosure.  This post is a review of a product I was sent for free.  All opinions are my own.

Snapfish personalised gifts review and giveaway

We’ve decided to do something a little bit different for Father’s Day gifts this year. The boys have drawn pictures for Dad which I then uploaded to Snapfish for them. We used their designs for the front cover of a notebook each for them to give Dad. They are going to add a couple more pictures to the inside of the notebooks too.

It was very simple to set up an account with Snapfish and to upload images and photos. However both boys’ drawings were landscape and out of the 39 notebook designs, which I know sounds a lot, there were very few that both worked with a landscape image and were acceptable to the boys. Blossom, petals and pink were all ruled out.

Blue Simplicity got their vote, but in order to vary them, we did son1’s as a Full Photo instead, but with the notebook rotated so the spiral is at the top. So let’s hope Snapfish add a few more male orientated designs to the notebook range, especially as notebooks are featured when you drill down on ‘shopping for him’.

All the notebooks currently retail at £5.99 but it doesn’t state the dimensions. You can select either lined or blank paper.

We’ve also used a photo for a Father’s day card. I was amazed at the wide selection of cards in this category, a staggering 230 of them. Some of them are for other male relatives. I wanted to filter them down before showing to the boys for selection, but although there seemed plenty of filters, the only one that helped was to filter down by number of photos. We had already chosen one photo for the card. This filter reduced our results to 155. I was hoping that the by orientation filter would apply to the photo, but no it applied to the card. So instead I reminded the boys that we had chosen a landscape photo and they looked at about the first 20 before choosing.

They changed the background from brown to blue and added Happy Father’s Day text to the inside of the card. We also had the option of adding text to the front and back, rotating the text and adding more photos to the inside or back. And we could have chosen to have the card posted directly to the recipient.

This design of card currently costs £2.99 but most of the cards are £2.49 with a few at £1.99.

And finally I chose a selection of our favourite recent photographs for a set of 6 placemats. Again it doesn’t state the dimensions. These currently cost £24.99 for 6. They can also be purchased individually or in pairs.

The items were dispatched separately. The notebooks arrived first amazingly quickly, less than 36 hours after I placed the order. The boys were very pleased with them and have squirrelled them away to add extra drawings and messages prior to Father’s Day. And I was glad to see that they were a good size, namely A5.

Then two days later, two more packages arrived. The card looked great and I was very pleased to see on the back that 15p of the purchase price goes to Macmillan Cancer Support. I hadn’t picked up on that when ordering.

And as for the mats, wow, they look amazing and should make a good talking point at the table. Size wise, they are 19.5 by 23.5 cm. All three packages were well packed.

We are very pleased with our Father’s Day purchases from Snapfish and recommend that you take a look. Please note that the last order date for Father’s Day is 15 June 2015.

And I’m hosting a rafflecopter competition to giveaway a £40 Snapfish voucher to one lucky winner. What a great prize.

a Rafflecopter giveaway – Please click on the link to enter.

And you may see my other giveaways here.

I’d love to hear what you would choose from Snapfish?

Visit Yet Another Blogging Mummy on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram

Disclosure.  I received a voucher to purchase items from Snapfish.  All opinions are my own.

3d Decoupage project including a docrafts giveaway

Making 3d decoupage pictures and cards used to be one of my favourite hobbies before the boys were born. I still have a drawer full of prints waiting for me to find time to do more crafting. So I was delighted to have the opportunity to receive a free Roald Dahl design decoupage card kit from docrafts to review.

The docrafts website has loads of creative inspiration for crafting projects, plus a wide range of products for sale. It also has a busy crafting forum. Do take a look

The design I received was The Big Friendly Giant. Instructions were on the reverse of the kit and when I opened it, I found it was a good size A5 card. The kit contained a preprinted card, an insert paper, 3 sheets of images and an envelope.

Following the instructions, I glued the insert into the card. Then I pressed out the images of the BFG plus some of the greetings. No scissors needed, so a lot simpler than any decoupage I have done previously. The images are numbered so it is easy to build up the layers. I used double sticky pads that I already had in my crafting stash, but I would have expected the kit to have contained these.

Also there was no indication to use sticky pads or decoupage glue in the layering instructions. A beginner might not know what to use. For instance you would end with a very different look if you used a glue stick.

Very quickly I had finished my card. I approved of the idea to include a wide range of greetings and quotes, choosing to make my card for a birthday. And I was pleased to see that the envelope was expanding, so the card slid in easily.

Afterwards I realised that I had glued my insert paper in back to front. Oops. But my mistake isn’t noticeable unless you look closely at the page numbers. And I partly blame it on the way the insert paper was folded. To have done it correctly, I would have needed to refold the insert paper the opposite way to that supplied.

In summary, a lovely craft kit, but more detailed instructions would be helpful for beginners.

This kit is available to purchase from docrafts for £4. A good price for a nice little craft project.

And I’m hosting a rafflecopter competition to giveaway a Roald Dahl Duper Ultimate Die-Cut and Paper Pack courtesy of docrafts to one lucky winner. This features 4 Roald Dahl stories: Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Fantastic Mr Fox & The Enormous Crocodile. This Roald Dahl A4 Duper Ultimate Die-cut & Paper Pack is bursting with papers, decoupage, toppers, tags, alphabets, memory pockets & more! Contains a bumper 48 sheets presented in a beautifully finished box which is bursting with inspirational Make Your Own project ideas. A lovely prize.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you can’t see the Rafflecopter box above, either click the Rafflecopter link or you may alternatively enter via my Facebook page.

Disclosure.  This post is a review of products I was sent for free.  All opinions are my own.