Alrighty everyone, I am super excited by this! Every year, our Elf Peppermint arrives with a letter on “Official Elf Mail” stationery which I do up in photoshop and print. You can read about our Elf and how we ‘Elf on the Shelf’ here and here.
Every year I am asked if I can make and sell letters to those of you who want to have your elf friend bring a custom letter to your kids, too. The truth is I hardly have time to breathe some nights let alone make Elf letters for you even though I really want to help spread that magic at Christmas… so last evening I had a brainwave that I could possibly try out the stationery in pic monkey, which is a free online website for photo editing etc – way way easier to use than photoshop, and if it worked I could do a tutorial for you all. So here we are!
What you need to do is fairly simple. First – Download the jpg (image) of the Elf letter here.
Head on over to pic monkey and hover over the “edit” button, then click “computer” and find the ALD_elf_letter.jpg file you just downloaded.
That will open the Elf Letter for you to start editing! To the left you have your tools. See the little button above the butterfly with the ‘Tt’ – this is you text tool. Click on that for your text options.
Add some text, you can play with the fonts, the colour, the size – it’s all there on the screen. Just have a fiddle with it to get a feel for how it works.
Here I’ve changed the colour and size of the text. Click on the text you’ve written to move the text box to where you want it. You can add more than one text box and place them where ever you like.
Write your letter and when you’re happy, hit the “Save” button right above the letter and save it to your computer. Perhaps change the name to add the year or something, that way you can keep the original blank letter for next time. I chose the “Sean” quality but I’m sure the “Pierce” would be enough too.
Now find that file you just saved on your computer and open it, print and you’re good to go! It will probably by default print A4 size, if you’re happy with that – awesome! I print mine smaller (a5 size) and if you want to do that, you will have to change your printer settings which will probably look a little something like this:
So there you have it! A pretty easy tutorial on how to make your own Official Elf Mail letter using pic monkey. I hope that it has been helpful and that my instructions make sense! Let me know how you go 🙂 I hope you have fun!! x
ps. like with all my other printables, this is for personal and classroom use only. Please do not use for commercial purposes as this is a violation of copyright.
©2014 a little delightful.
This is great, thanks so much Bianca.
Thank you so much! x
I think that even I could do this! Your instructions seem easy enough that I’m inspired to give it a go. Now I’m thinking that you might have got me started on something here……….can’t wait to try it!