Saturday, June 26, 2010

Craft:: Word Cloud Birthday Card

Wordle: david's birthday card

Wordle is my new addiction. Since discovering it a few weeks ago we have made word cloud birthday cards, a father's day card, teacher thank-you notes and some random artwork. It couldn't be more simple: type in a bunch of text. Repeat the words you'd like to appear bigger. In the case of David's card above, we typed in "birthday" six times, versus "cake" which was repeated twice and the smallest words were typed just once.  Hit the Create button and prepared to be amused and impressed. Change the font, colour and layout at the click of a button until you're happy. A tip: to keep two words together use the tilde symbol between the words. Type Happy ~ Birthday, or Mrs. ~ Smith or other words that go together. The ~ will display as a space in your finished image. On my computer the tilde key is right above the tab button, and I have to hold down the shift key to get it to display.

To make a birthday card, I print out the image on on card stock and trim to size using a Fiskar's paper trimmer that also has a scoring blade that makes a crisp centre crease. The finished card measures 4.25" by 5.5", which is just the right size to hold a standard gift card.

Happy weekend