How to Print Cards At Home | Printer & Paper Recs, Cutting & Scoring Cards)

[Music] so in this video I'm going to show you how to start printing cards at home whether you want to do that for personal use or if you want to start selling them and if you don't know who I am hi I'm Jordan I have been selling greeting cards for about eight years and most of that time I was printing them at home up until the last year and a half I started Outsourcing when I first started out I was using just a regular standard color printer nothing fancy and I think it was just card stock from Michael's but then eventually I wanted to start wholesaling my product and I wanted to have a more professional feeling card and your normal like standard printer they can't handle thicker card stock so I knew I needed to get a new printer so the first printer I bought was napson Artisan 1430 I believe that's the number it's been it's been a long time but that died on me Black Friday one of the years it just refused to print I think it was red and green and it was around Christmas and I was like these are the two colors I needed to be able to print so I had to hurry up and buy a new printer and so I went with the can in Pixma Pro 100 since then I've upgraded to the 200 only because during covid you kind of find ink anywhere and the 100 at that point was a few years old and so I was like well I might as well just get a new printer get the ink because the ink for the 200 was readily available um what I will say about the Cannons compared to the Epson is that they are a lot more picky with card stock so they print on like Photo Paper beautifully like it's unreal how perfect they print on photo paper cardstock on the other hand I had to easily go through like 10 different types before I found one that was sturdy enough and printed good basically I was running into lots of issues I landed on one that I love and I've been using them ever since up until I started Outsourcing what I've always done from the beginning is I caught my eight and a half by eleven paper in half so it's the size of an A2 greeting card and I find that to be the easiest because um if you're doing like a full color print and you have to cut down the line you have to cut it exactly precise and I don't know about you but I can't do that it's it's never 100 accurate and I just didn't like the idea of some of the color being added to the other card so this is what I use to print all my cards it's a fist card paper trimmer and yeah you've probably seen something like this before but you definitely are gonna need a paper cutter having a scoring board like this this is the Martha Stewart one and when I got it it was about like 15 and now every time I look on Amazon it's a different price so if you can find this in Michael's or something like that get something similar to this it basically just helps you score down uh the middle of the card and it makes it easier to fold so that's the main two things you're going to need obviously you're also going to need a printer paper and envelopes I like using craft envelopes and you can get those from Michael's Amazon wherever I will say that I get my paper and envelopes from what are they called french paper they are a local Michigan business I like supporting them mostly because they're from Michigan but also because they have really nice envelopes sometimes craft envelopes can be scratchy and I don't really like that texture so I like that the craft envelopes that they have are smooth enough to write on them I will leave some more recommendations in the description it all just depends on what you need and what you're using them for it's all personal preference so what I like might not be what you like and vice versa now the next thing you need is a design to print whether you are making it yourself or you are buying one of my printable greeting cards you're gonna want to make sure the card is sized to A2 or letter so I'm currently editing the video and I talk about how you want a two size greeting cards and I didn't really mention why so number one if you are selling them wholesale or anything like that you're gonna want to do A2 because they are smaller than 5x7 so I actually have a 5x7 print right here so here is the difference between A2 and 5x7 that's a huge difference in the size card like look at how much more space this takes out so now think about if you had 10 cards in a row that's like one or two cards more that they could be selling if they were doing A2 so from a retail perspective brick and mortars are leaning more towards A2 this is just pretty much standard size in America the second reason I recommend it is because you can print two on one sheet or you can cut and get two out of that one sheet so for 5x7 you can get one card per sheet so that means when I'm doing an A2 card I'm literally saving half as much money as uh five by seven so from a business perspective it's a lot more cost effective to do a two versus five by seven the next reason I recommend it is because there's less space I am the person who fills up this entire page and if I have a lot to say I will do both I don't have 5x7 amount of things to say though and maybe you're not the type of person who wants to write a whole novel in your cards it kind of looks a little blank if you just write one thing all the way up here and then you have like literally an entire card size like empty so if you're not a writer writing things down you might want small ER the A2 just works out for me you do whatever works best for you so the letter size paper would come like this with two of them and you would just cut it right at the five and a half inch Mark I didn't leave a line for this because I don't want you to have to have the same struggle I had where you had to cut it perfectly on that line I also have just a two size cards as well alright so I'm going to cut out my sheet of paper I'm going to cut it at the five and a half inch mark I'll just hold that down cut [Music] you have two sheets of paper so I'm actually going to show you with the paper I used to use as well as this polar matte paper which prints beautifully but it's really hard to cut it's very thick paper so you can hear this one's gonna be harder to cut so definitely possible but you'll see when I go to fold it that you have some cracking so I'm going to show you the comparison between the polar mat and the regular card stock that I use you can also see that this one's a little bit creamier and this one's wider foreign now that I've got the paper loader I'm going to come back to my computer hit print I'm going to select my printer so for this printer I had to create a custom size and you can see the custom size is five and a half by eight and a half which is the size of this whole sheet and I'm gonna hit print foreign [Music] are the right out of the printer results I hope you can see the difference is that this one's a little bit more vibrant this one's a little bit more faded but overall the actual print quality is great on both of them so the main difference with the two papers is this one's a little bit more vibrant the colors are a little bit more true to what they were on screen but if you never saw this you would still think this one's pretty great as well now where this one lacked a little bit was the next step after you've printed you are going to score them so to fold it in half you score at the A2 line which is 4.25 what I found to just work for me is I hold down on both sides so that it doesn't move when you're coming down and then I just you just drag it along that line okay this one this one's going to be easier and you could just leave that as the step and put the envelope right in but I like to just run it over one time and this one you can already see this one's a lot harder a lot harder to fold that's why this part is crucial to this card however when I was using this paper some shipments of this would make this spine crack right now this one looks fine I just wanted to let you know that sometimes this one did crack on the spine when I would fold it so it's a really high quality paper worked really nicely with the Canon printers you can see they both stand up that was kind of my test do they stand up on their own if they fell over I felt like that was too flimsy of a card to sell for personal use it was totally totally acceptable though so what are your thoughts are you going to try trading cards at home or is this something that you're not even interested in you'd rather drive to the store for me I love the convenience of if there's a last minute birthday party or something like that I can just print a card at home and I don't have to go out to the store or and get a Cheesy card I can get the one that I want also let me know which which card did you prefer did you prefer the polar mat or the standard card stock and I'd love to hear your thoughts down in the comments if you are not a designer but you want to be able to buy cards that you can print at home I have over 50 designs on my website now and whether it's a congrats graduation a new baby anything you need a card for I probably have something and if you have any questions at all about selling making any part of the greeting card process let me know like I said earlier I've been doing this for eight years so I have lots of answers to give and I am so happy to help foreign

Channel: JordynAlisonDesigns

Views: 5,871

Keywords: how to make greeting cards, how to make cards, make cards at home, print cards at home

Id: Vk4yeTOy0js

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 02 2023