Stop!
Don’t buy Thanksgiving cards this year!
Grab your craft supply and make gorgeous DIY Thanksgiving cards with free printables of adorable graphics. Kids will love this craft project, too, as the little printable cartoons are so much fun to play with.

I prepared a whole designer’s kit for you, including a template of the card’s measurements (in case you hate measuring manually, like me) and two pages of printable Thanksgiving illustrations.

If you like these illustrations and you want to use them in other creative project, check out my Thanksgiving Clipart Set and the Fall clipart & patterns set which are available on my Etsy shop. All the graphics are saved individually as PNG files with transparent background, as well as SVG and EPS vector files for maximum editability. The clip art sets is licensed for personal and small commercial uses. Click on the images to see them:

Design your own DIY Thanksgiving cards with free printables

You will need:

• White card stock that fits in the printer
• colorful card stock / craft paper
• Scissors
• Double sided foam adhesive tape
• Butter knife
• Craft knife (not a must)
• Stick glue
• These printable Thanksgiving illustrations (2 pages PDF file)
• This printable template for the card’s interior

Step 1:

Print out the illustration pages on a white card stock.

Step 2:

Print the template for the card interior on a white card stock. This is the part that goes inside the card, where you can write your message. The dashed line is where you will later make a crease to fold your card.

I used a ruler and a craft knife to cut the card’s interior from the template.

Step 3:

Plan the design of your Thanksgiving card: Choose the card stock color to be used as the card’s outer layer and the illustrations that you want to put on it.

Step 4:

Cut out the illustrations that you want for your card. Leave 2 mm white margins around each illustration, to make the cartoons look sticker-like and to avoid the little corners that are hard to cut. For the grass banners and the text frames I didn’t leave margins. Just thought it looked better.

Step 5:

Cut the outer layer of the card from the colored card stock you chose. Make the outer layer a little bit larger than the inner layer. To do this, paste the inner layer on the corner of your colored card stock, around 5 mm from the edges, and then cut the colored card stock around it.

Step 5:

Fold your card like a pro: place a ruler on the dashed line of the card’s inner layer and trace it with the dull side of butter knife. You don’t want to cut through the paper, just to make a soft crease that will allow the card to fold easily.

Once you have that crease, fold your card carefully.

Step 6:

Now you have a nice blank card you can decorate with the printable illustrations!

Paste the illustrations using either stick glue or double sided sponge tape. The double sided tape will add a 3D effect to your card. In my cards there are a few cartoons pasted flat with the stick glue and the rest are elevated with the double sided foam tape.

Make sure you paste the illustrations in the right order, with the grass strip pasted first and the rest pasted over it.

I added an extra banner that I cut out freely from card stock, to write “from” or “to” on it.

And it’s done!
What designs did you come up with? If you’d like to show your creations, share this tutorial on Pinterest and click “tried it”.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Liked these DIY Thanksgiving cards? You might also like my free printable Thanksgiving tags. Take a look:

And if you want to make the kids smile in you Thanksgiving dinner, grab this free printable Thanksgiving table setting kit:

*Please note that all of the free printables on my website are for your own personal, non-commercial use. Thank you!