My parents used to use this title phrase when I was growing up. For some reason, I thought of it when I went about changing some of my created backgrounds (Background Check Online Card Class) into cards.  Now my parents usually used the phrase in the negative sense, that is, if an item is useless to begin with, it will remain useless in spite of one’s efforts to gussy it up. Today I am using it in the positive sense, as I was able to make two pretty nice cards from backgrounds that had problems (extreme curling & ink smudge).  The third one seemed to co-operate from the get go and was always a “silk purse”  Here are three of my backgrounds turned into cards.