I DID A THING!
Remember back when I blogged about the baby book exchange that my best friend and I planned so that we could share the children's books that we acquired between the two of us. Well...I did a thing! If you haven't read it, go read about it!
I had been thwarted in my attempts to create a mail merge document because Pages for Mac doesn't have that feature. So I did end up copying and pasting data into each of my library card inserts myself, but first, I needed them all in one place, (and preferably without going crosseyed trying to type it all.)
In order to compile a database of my children's books, I dowloaded an app called Book Buddy Pro, which is an app that can scan your ISBN codes on the back of books and compile it all for you so that you are spared the work of typing all of that into Numbers or Excel yourself!
It was the PERFECT APP!
But my baby book library still had issues to overcome! It turned out that, as small as I wanted to make the inserts, I couldn't run anything so small through my printer, then, I found out about the lack of a mail merge capability after that. I left this project alone for months...until TODAY!
While looking through the clearance section at Walmart, I found these:
These are card sleeves from Southworth and I just couldn't pass them up! The measurements that I had in mind were no larger than a business card, and that's exactly what these were designed to hold! I bought every single package that they had. If you look at the bottom left corner of the package, I noticed that there were templates provided for this product and that was all I needed! I was asking myself, "Are you really going to take these to Kinko's and print on them? (I prefer the smooth quality of laser ink.) Then, I thought about foiling these after printing...but all of that was time consuming and I was not willing to wait a moment longer. Finally, I thought, "I'VE GOT IT!"
My best friend, the one with whom I conceived this idea, gifted me a silhouette with sketch pens for my birthday and I decided to use them! The pack had 10 sheets with three sleeves a piece which amounted to a total of 30! I designed a stork carrying books to adorn my sleeve inserts and in order to accomplish this, I used the template that was downloaded from the manufacturer and converted it into a .PNG image that could be added to silhouette, no resizing necessary. Then, I knew where my drawing should fit on the page. After that, I let my silhouette do the rest!
Now, to print out my inserts? Well begun is only half done, after all. I created my inserts to resemble an old fashioned library card using Pages for Mac. After copying and pasting all of the book information tnto my document, I saved it to a pdf and repeated the process of converting the .PDF into .PNG and inserting them into silhouette. However, this time, I added registration marks and printed. Now, instead of using my sketch pen, I was using my auto blade to cut along the lines that I drew and with added registration marks.
And that was it! Months of frustration just came to an end. I am overjoyed!