I love making greeting cards for all occasions, including St. Patrick’s Day. From sending holiday cards to relatives with pictures of your kids to finishing off a homemade teacher gift, a handmade card adds the perfect touch. Greeting cards also serve as ideal packaging for small gifts, like cash and gift certificates, and even make perfect gifts on their own. Sending someone a card you made yourself always gives the gesture a meaningful element.
I truly believe in designing simple DIY St. Patrick’s Day cards. It’s fun to create cards with tons of Stampin’ Up kits or Silhouette templates or to learn more advanced card making techniques, such as paper quilling. But you can also make beautiful, festive cards with very basic materials and limited crafting knowledge. I stick to crafting supplies that most veteran crafters already own and that new crafters can pick up in a single trip to Michaels without breaking the bank. Happy card making!
Note: I link all of the templates I use at the end of the post.
I started simple with a paper punched shamrocks design in two different colors. Cutting shamrocks this small gets fiddly (cutting larger ones isn’t so bad), so I recommend picking up a shamrock paper punch. It’s one of the few holiday-specific supplies you’ll need for the cards in this post, I promise!
I love pairing solid and patterned shamrocks to keep a greeting card from getting too busy. I did sneak a “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” message onto the bottom of this card, but I love the design with the shamrocks on their own, too.
It’s hard to go wrong with basic color blocking. I cut a full sheet for the color at the top and then work my way down. Building with a full sheet from the bottom works fine, too. You’ll get a more even look creating the card in this fashion than you will cutting small strips of color.
While I’m not sure if my holiday takes on my classic “just a note” design will ever be as popular as the original, I like experimenting with new variations. I use All Piano Scores and print the music on cardstock for my greeting cards. I cut off the very right edge of my shamrock to add a bit of visual interest to this card design.
Creating a shamrock with multiple hearts is such a great crafting hack. Using a heart paper punch is the simplest way to create uniformly cut hearts for seamless layering. Glue down a bottom layer of four flat hearts. Then fold four hearts in half and glue down just the centers to give your shamrock dimension.
I took the watercolor shamrocks concept straight from Crafty Morning. Thanks for this fabulous idea, Michelle! The only changes I made were to create four-leaf instead of three-leaf clovers and to glue my clovers flat. You can glue down only the centers as Michelle did or create layered clovers as I did for my previous card. I recommend creating a full 8×10 watercolor page, so you have lots of options for choosing the best color combinations as you punch your hearts.
Remember the quilt card that I made for Valentine’s Day? You can customize this concept for any holiday or occasion. I chose not to add a “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” message, but of course you can if you like.
There are so many wonderful Irish blessings, which are perfect for St. Patrick’s Day cards. The message size is small enough to fit a shamrock border on either side of it.
I can’t make a set of greeting cards without sneaking in a few buttons. I added a small white button to each shamrock to give the card a little more dimension over the simple text of another Irish blessing. For this text, I purposely sized it slightly too big for the card, so it would fill the entire page.
I saved the shamrocks in a mason jar for last because it may be my favorite design in the set. It’s also the most fiddly. I adore these tiny hearts, but they are not easy to cut, fold, or glue. I don’t have a heart punch in this size, so I cut them by hand. It was so worth it, though. The hearts measure about 1/2″ in diameter at the widest point, if you do want to try to find a punch.
I left all of my simple DIY St. Patrick’s Day cards blank on the inside. It’s completely up to you if you’d like to write messages in them!
I have a comprehensive post about my favorite greeting card tools and supplies, which covers all of the supplies products that I used to make my St. Patrick’s Day cards!
Shamrock templates:
Single size large shamrock | Shamrocks in multiple sizes (the fourth pattern)
A2-Sized Simple DIY St. Patrick’s Day templates:
Irish blessing 1 | Irish blessing 2 | Mason jar (original source)
Do you need a few more shamrock templates for your simple DIY St. Patrick’s Day cards?
My friend Natasha has a fantastic round-up with 17+ free printable four-leaf clover and shamrock templates in all sizes!
[Disclaimer: There are a few affiliate links in this post. Thanks for your support!]
Did you make any of the simple DIY St. Patrick's Day cards?
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