Printer Friendly Christmas Crafts

Hello hello! Welcome to my Christmas Printer Craft special! As you may know, I have been working with Kodak in the last few weeks on trying out their fabulous new printer and their  economical new ink cartridges. Lots of crafty printer play.

free-printablesAs part of that, I have discover a yet unknown love: Printables. I never really gave them “much thought”.. but am now a massive convert. Printables are basically any thing you can, well print. From gift tags to origami paper to paper dolls. Printables have become a “new feature” of my blog with their very on “tab”: Free Printables.. check out what I found for you so far: I  love how they get you out of a pickle in hurry (see our Halloween Treat “problem”) or make every day things instantly look pretty (see our cupcake wrappers). But I am digressing.

Today’s post is about our two Christmas crafts:

  1. Our DIY Christmas Cards.
  2. And the Art Calendar project I have been working on all year with Red Ted.

Christmas Cards:

This is really very straight forward. I don’t know about you, but we love “photos” on our cards and although you can get many done online, I personally love a “plain card” with a photo on it. I usually recycle the card – e.g. my brother in law salvaged a bunch of old brochures from work, and I cut the back out to make lovely little square cards. Then of course I need the “design for the front” of the card. The idea is, that it has to look nice but that it is also not too expensive to produce (I have a 100 cards to send…).

With the new economical ink cartridges from Kodak, I decided to embrace colour this year and go for two gorgeous photos of the children:

I like to be 100% in control of my printing.. so my “favourite cheat” is to use powerpoint to arrange the size of the pictures and the number. My little cards are 10cm x 10cm. So in powerpoint I made sure my photos were 8cm x 8cm for a nice fit.

I decided to print on A4, which means I could get 6 photos (3 cards) per A4 sheet.

Then comes the printing and cutting job… print out as many copies as you need and then whilst settling down to a favourite TV or radio programme chop them all up. Yes, it can take a little while, but the result is always worth it! When all is cut out, stick on your cards. Lovely!

As you can see, I went for a black (recycled) card. I cut it 10cm x 10cm. And chose to do two photos of the children – one each. A little unusual, but I thought it would be fun and oh so  colourful. I am hoping people will “display the card open”, so you can see both photos equally!

The Calendar

four seasonsYou can follow the progress of our calendar on the blog. I updated it every so often. The highlight of the calendar no doubt are our four seasons.

I knew we had lots of pretty pictures and crafts, but what was the best way of bringing it together? Also, how do you make calendar for more than one set of grandparents of “equal loveliness”…? Aaah well.. do a print version of course. I decided to go DIY. I scanned or took photos of all our crafts and then using calendar template arranged them all in a word document (I am sure I could have done it in power point too):

You can adjust the “downloaded” template and make it narrow and smaller to fit the pages better. You can also adjust all your artwork to fit the same amount of “white” space to give it more consistency over the pages.

I bought 160gsm (ordinary paper is 80 or 90gsm) so that it is a little thicker and lasts better, but not too stiff and thick like card. But it is a personal preference.

Design a cover and then hit print!

What do you think? A great present, no?

And as you have done it all on the computer you can make extra copies – one for all the grandparents and one for yourself/ the office/ god parents etc!

I hope you are inspired to look at your printer in a new way and to get crafty!

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