How To Print Your Own Christmas Cards

Often relegated to the bottom of the Christmas to-do list by presents and food, Christmas cards are a small but essential part of Christmas. Unfortunately, if you leave buying them to the last minute, you either can’t get your hands on a good card or you have to pay out through the nose for the expensive cards early shoppers turned their noses up at.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the age of the internet and affordable printers, all you need to save time and money on Christmas card shopping is a printer, some ink cartridges, some card and a bit of imagination!

Making your own Christmas cards can be a fun Christmas printing project for all the family and can save you a lot of money on pricey shop bought cards. If you own your own business, personalised Christmas cards can be a nice touch for your employees - so long as you don’t mind using your business supplies for Christmas card production purposes!

However, making your own cards isn’t as simple as sticking an image of your family into Word and hitting print 50 times. In this post, we’re going to talk you through a few of the basics of designing and printing your own Christmas cards. We’re not going to tell you exactly what to do (that’s where your imagination comes in!) but by following these tips, you should produce a batch of cards that rivals the best and leaves your family and friends with their jaws on the floor!

Designing Your Card

You might think that to design your own Christmas card that you need to invest hundreds of pounds into elaborate graphic design software but that couldn’t be further from the truth. You can design a beautiful Christmas card in pre-packaged design programs such as Paint and yes, even MS Word!

There are plenty of excellent tutorials online on the specifics of designing your own Christmas cards using the likes of Word, including this handy guide from WiseGeek. You can also find quite a few free (or at least cheap) card templates around the web, so don’t get too worried if the prospect of designing a card from scratch terrifies you!

Printing Your Christmas Cards

We know what you’re thinking; how hard can printing a Christmas card be? Well, pretty hard actually! If you have a duplex-capable printer then printing your cards should be a doddle but if you have a plain old inkjet then you may find things slightly more difficult as you’ll need to print double sided manually!

To do this, run a few test runs to determine how exactly paper feeds into your printer - some printers will print on the same side as the paper is fed in while others will flip the paper as they print.

To conduct the test, draw up a draft Christmas card, marking each side, using a pen and print anything. From this, you can determine how exactly your printer is going to churn out your finished masterpiece and set up accordingly.

So we’re ready to print, right? Not quite. Before you hit print, you’ll need to make sure you’re only printing one page at a time, so set up the print to produce just the first page. Once this page has been printed correctly, flip the paper over and set up so that only the second page prints. You should now have have produced your own slice of Christmas magic!

Of course, this card will be the first of many and printing that many cards can be costly - but it doesn’t need to be. Consider stocking up on compatible ink cartridges before you print out your cards as they produce a quality equivalent to OEM cartridges at a fraction of the cost! Also opt for recycled card over regular card; it can be slightly more expensive but it adds a nice sustainable touch to your batch of cards!

And that’s about it! So if you don’t fancy splashing out a fortune on cards this Christmas and want to give your friends and family a unique greeting this Christmas, why not make your own cards. Oh, and if you need any ink or toner cartridges before you start, don’t forget to pop down to your local Cartridge World store!