A Desperate Plea & Some Vistaprint Tips and Tricks

Happy weekend friends!  For those of you who just had your first week back, enjoy your two days off!  I'm not bragging here... just sayin'... but we don't go back until September 4th in Michigan!

I'm going to start off my post today with a desperate plea.

Last year I received two Nooks from Donor's Choose and had to leave them behind when I changed schools... I had put up another proposal to get two more Nooks after I saw how much my kiddos loved them, but it didn't get funded before the year ended.

Now that proposal is about to expire and it isn't fully funded!

I know sometimes teachers get gift codes from Donor's Choose or can apply the monies from an unfunded project to another project... so... if you happen to have any gift codes laying around and are looking for a project to fund, please consider mine!

It expires on August 20th!

You can click the Nook pic below to check it out!

Ok.  On to Vistaprint...


I had a lot of people asking how to do custom items on Vistaprint and it is just a matter of designing them yourself, saving as a PDF, uploading, and then cropping the item.

So... here's how I did my custom "Thank You" postcards...

I designed them in Publisher:

Then went to Vistaprint and selected standard postcards and that I wanted to upload my own design:

I uploaded the file:

And then chose to crop it:

When I went to crop it, the selection box wouldn't fit right- I had to rotate it- there are two little arrows in the box that you click to rotate your image.  You can see them better in a picture below...

 

See the little dashed rectangle around my circled image?  That's the cropping box- you just pull on the corners of it to resize it and place it on the image you want uploaded.

So, now the front of my card is ready.  I would approve it and get ready to make the back by clicking to go to the back design of my card...

I put TWO images on the page I uploaded... this way I only have to pay for ONE upload, but I can crop what I need for the front of the card and the back of the card.  So, when I'm ready to do my back, I need to use a previously uploaded image...

So, I used the previously uploaded image and cropped it. but again, the image had to be rotated.  You can see the arrows better in this picture:

After that, you'd just accept the proof and go do more uploading!

This was a lot of trial and error for me at first, but now I'm pretty quick at it.  I have a file saved on my computer with some of the Vistaprint things I've made so, when I make new items, I just open the file and tweak what I had already.

Sometimes the products come and I haven't got it *quite* right... I just got a banner on which I made two banners, but they were pretty small... however, when I hung them up in my room, they actually worked quiet well!  :)

It's so fun doing Vistaprint... I hope this was a little helpful to you and your creative side!

PS- just a reminder... Back to School sale at TpT begins tomorrow!  Be sure you enter the code BTS12 at checkout to get an additional 10% off everything in my shop which will already be 20% off... for a grand total of 30% off!  I hear you can fill your cart now and check out during the sale for the discounts!

Teacher's Notebook is having huge BTS sales too... but they start TODAY over there for lots of sales... including one at my shop where everything is 20% off until the 13th!