Wow! This thread exploded overnight. Thanks for all the comments.
I would have used photoshop... but my laptop doesn't have it and I don't have the money to buy it again... so I just used MSFT Word (07).
To make the background, I found a pretty textile print that I liked (from here: Indian Textile Patterns,Designs for Fashion Designers,For Housewives) and put it into word and colorized it to make it white. I really didn't think the shape looked like what I wanted, so I actually took two of the designs and manipulated them around to get a pattern that I liked. I used the freeform shape tool to draw the funky wavy shape and filed it with a gradient. I used the snipping tool in Windows Vista to do a "screen capture" and made the two in to one graphic.
To make the boarding pass shape, I used the rounded-corner square tool and made two of them... one long and one short... and put them together. I then made a white square to temporarily hide the intersecting lines. I took another screen capture to make it one graphic and then made the white area transparent so I could put my background in it.
There really is an easier way to do it, but I was ticked that I didn't have the right tool and did what I could using Word.
I'll post the template shortly. The fonts that I used were Calbri and Blackjack (blackjack from dafont.com).