Creating Custom Seed Packets as Party Favors and Presents

Creating Custom Seed Packets as Party Favors and Presents
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So you’ve got a friend, or a group of friends, who love to garden, but you’re never sure what to get them when they always seem to have the latest and greatest equipment. Or maybe you belong to the local farmers market, and you’re looking for a fantastic way to make some friends or even extra money. Or maybe you belong to a local gardening club, and it’s your turn to host the Sunday luncheon. Or maybe you just love to take pride in growing something yourself, and you’re looking to help share that feeling with others.

These are all spectacular reasons to think about creating seed packet favors. These cute little customized pouches of seeds are a great gift for any gardeners in your life. Here we’ll show you some fantastic tips and tricks for designing your own seed envelopes, as well as great ways to present them to your friends and family.

Finding Suitable Envelopes

Organization of Seed Packets

A quick trip down to your local office supply store should offer you a myriad of envelopes to choose from, ranging from itty-bitty to quite large. Generally, seeds are stored in small envelopes to save on space and fit into containers like the example on the right, so try to find yourself an envelope that is around four inches by five inches, though a little smaller wouldn’t hurt either.

If your local office supply store doesn’t offer these sizes, sometimes gardening centers in home improvement stores can provide them for a reasonable price. And of course, these fantastic little pouches are available for cheap if you’re willing to do a little bit of legwork searching the internet. You shouldn’t expect to pay more than three dollars for 20-50 envelopes, which should be the perfect amount for a small to medium sized project.

There are also some great envelope making templates out there, that you can customize to suit your needs.

Creating your Design

Carrot Seeds

Now comes the fun part! Using a program like Adobe Photoshop, you can create your own designs that range from cute and simple to elegant and elaborate. You might want to include some cute vintage art for your seed packet , or you might want to include a picture or illustration of what plants the seeds come from. Just make sure that you keep your design well within the limits of the envelopes dimensions.

For example, if you have envelopes that are four inches by five inches, you should try to keep the design somewhere around three and three-quarter inches by four and three-quarter inches. Leaving yourself a comfortable one-fourth inch margin will keep you from accidentally printing off the packet, while still making the most out of the limited space available to you. Of course, if you wish to cover the entire front of your envelope with a pattern, that’s okay too! Just keep all vital information (see section below) toward the center of the envelope, and allow your patterned background to “bleed” or go completely to the edges of the envelope!

Important Information to Include

Decorative Seed Packets

At the absolute least, you should always include the type of seed that is inside the packet, and try to be as specific as possible. Sure, you’re giving someone tomato seeds, but what kind of tomato seeds are they? Are they Roma tomatoes? Beefsteak? Cherry? After all, there are a ton of different types of tomatoes and they offer different flavors, grow in different sizes, have different intended purposes, and sometimes require different care.

And if you’re offering a particularly finicky plant, you might want to include tips for the needed amount of sunlight, how much water they require, and how often they need to be trimmed, transplanted, or any other special treatment. This way you can give your seeds, and your future gardener, the best chance at success!

Printing Tips

Printing out seed packets isn’t much different than printing other types of envelopes - it mostly requires a few minutes of setting up a custom template. While you can do this in Photoshop, I fully believe that the best way is to use a program like Microsoft Word or Open Office’s Writer. These programs offer the ability to import your graphics created in other programs and have a fully customizable template for envelope printing .

Resources

References: Author’s experience in graphic design.

Image Credits:

Lithograph Seed Packets by Eric N6oim

Organizing my Seed Stash by Susy Morris

Carrot Seeds by Brian Everette

Seed Packets by Rebecca F