Frugal Friday: Home Made Transparencies

I decided to join in the fun of another year doing the Ali Edwards December Daily album…I enjoyed it last year and am really looking forward to this year’s mini album. After looking at Ali’s instructions for getting the foundation of the mini album together I saw that she used a lot of transparencies. I don’t have any of these…so I whipped out the Michael’s coupon and took a trip down to the store. Well for $2 a 12X12 sheet, and I needed about 12 sheets….that was really gonna add up! Not to mention, the selection of transparencies was pretty slim….what is a cheap girl to do?


No question….break out that old box of transparency film I bought about a hundred years ago and get to making my own.

I only had about 5 sheets left in the box, which originally had 50…so you can imagine how long I have had this! I tried two different approaches to making my transparencies.

First, I opened up the program Print Shop on my computer, but MS Word would work just as well, and imported all the Christmas themed images I could find. Truth be told, all the images came with the Print Shop software…and if you can get your hands on it I recommend it…it is really easy to use and comes with oodles of copyright free images!

And then simply printed out the sheets! Too easy!




Secondly, I felt like I wanted some transparencies that just had one overall pattern…so I broke out the Staz-On inks and my Christmas themed stamps. First I cut the 8 1/2” X 11” sheets in half, since this would eventually be the size of my mini album.


I inked up my stamp…


Placed it on the rough side of the transparency…be sure to resist the urge to “wiggle” the stamp at all so that the image doesn’t smudge…and them lift straight up…


I started with my biggest snowflake stamp and then moved down the line to my smallest filling in all of the area.


I played around with a few other stamps and ideas and came up with these transparencies…
So in the end, they aren’t quite like say a good Hambly transparency, but for the price they will work and I had a lot of fun playing around with them!


So was the experiment worth it? Here is the tally:

Cost: $0 (again, I had everything on hand…but a box of transparencies run about $25 to $35 for a box of 50)
Fun Factor: This was pretty neat!
Time: Varied, but not too long.
Skill Level: Intermediate (a steady hand is a must)

So there it is, Home Made Transparencies! Easy Peasy…and Cheap! Cheap!