How to Print a Single Small Folding Card
Greeting cards are an excellent way to keep in touch, mark the holidays, or send some good cheer to your friends, family and colleagues. Greeting cards are also very expensive. However, with just a couple of hours of effort at home, you can make your own foldable greeting cards on your personal computer. This a much less expensive alternative to commercial cards and it gives you the option to fully customize your cards.
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Things You'll Need
- Computer
- Graphics software
- Printer
- High quality paper, letter size
- Ruler
Instructions
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1
Load the program in which you plan to design your card. A graphics program, like Photoshop or Microsoft Paint, works best.
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2
Create an empty image 8 1/2 inches wide by 11 inches tall, the size of standard letter paper. Be sure to use inches and not electronic units. This is the master image, which you will eventually print.
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Set all four page margins to 1/2 inch.
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Divide the image into 4 identical quadrants by running a black line 1 inch wide down the exact center of the page, both horizontally and vertically. Excluding the page margins and the black line margins, each quadrant will be 3 1/4 inches wide by 4 1/2 inches tall.
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Create more empty images, each one 3 1/4 inches by 4 1/2 inches. These will become the pages of your card. There will be up to four of them: a front cover, the inside left page, the inside right page and the back cover. The inside left page and back cover are optional.
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Fill in these images with the content of your card. You can write text or paste pictures. You can leave some areas blank so that you can write in them by hand once you print the card. You can create decorative borders around each image.
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Flip the front cover image upside down. If you have a back cover image, flip it upside down. This is necessary because of the way you will be folding your card.
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Copy each image one at a time and paste it into the large master image. The front cover of the card will go in the lower left quadrant. The inside left page will go in the upper left quadrant. The inside right page will go in the upper right quadrant. The back cover will go in the lower right quadrant. Paste your page images with precision, taking care not to overlap the page margins or the black line margins; otherwise, your card will not be properly centered.
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Delete the black lines or change their color to white.
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Print the image on high quality paper. You'll want to use a heavier stock than regular 20-pound copy paper, so that your card doesn't feel flimsy. You can purchase suitable paper from your local crafts store, or online. Index card stock, 90-pound to 110-pound, should suffice. The paper should be white or cream colored, as your images will not print clearly on richly-colored paper.
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Allow the ink to dry.
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Fold the printed card in half along the horizontal axis, so that the upper half of the paper (containing the inside pages) faces you and the lower half is folded beneath it. You may want to use a ruler to make your folds straight.
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Fold the card in half again, this time along the vertical axis, bringing the left half over to reveal the front cover.
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Crease your folds firmly. You may optionally tape or stitch them together. Your homemade greeting card is complete.
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Tips & Warnings
You can also use this method in a word processing program such as Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has a template for creating greeting cards, which yields a faster but less-customizable result than the from-scratch method described here.
