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September 14, 2006
[ CHRISTMAS IS COMING—START WORRYING! ]
FORGET THE YULETIDE SOCKS THIS YEAR — if you have a good quality inkjet printer you’re already set up to be your own Santa’s helper turning out unique presents that are all you own work. It’s worth poking around in the printer supply shops to see what specialised printing media are available.
From what we have spotted and tried we can report that the printer manufacturers can get you up and running making mouse pads, T shirts, photo albums that look like books and those sheets of stickers that children love. With some of the elementary photo editing programs you also get applications for making cards, calendars and photo album pages.
Small children love sheets of stickers and Canon makes photo stickers onto which to print 16 little pictures. Canon’s latest printer drivers come with software to set up the image for printing. You choose the picture for the sticker, dial up the number of times you want it printed, up to 16, put the paper in the printer and press go and bingo! Personalised stickers.
Both Canon and Epson make transfer paper for putting pictures onto T shirts. It’s a simple matter of printing the image onto the transfer paper and then ironing it onto the shirt. One small child of our acquaintance was highly delighted to get a T shirt decorated with one of her very own drawings. Canon’s T shirt transfers come in a pack of 10.
Canon’s mouse pad kit comes with one pad with adhesive surface and two transparent sheets for printing on — presumably a safeguard against making a dud. In this case the T shirt transfer paper type in either the Canon or Epson printer driver is used because, as with the transfer, it flips the image horizontally and prints it in mirror image. The reason being that the printed side of the transparent sheet is pressed down onto the adhesive surface of the pad. We found that the printed sheet has a tendency to lift from the pad. It is not 100 per cent satisfactory.
Both Epson and Canon make double sided photo paper for printing professional looking album pages. Canon’s paper is intended to be used in their excellent photo album kits that come in different sizes. The kit consists of an attractive dark blue binder and ten sheets of double sided paper. The binders hold a maximum of 20 sheets -- in effect 40 pages.
Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 4 [soon to be replaced with Elements 5] has a useful set of “create” tools that will turn photos into album pages, greeting cards and calendars. Each function comes with a selection of pre-set designs. The Calendar creation set is particularly good and making a calendar from photos is a breeze.
Officeworks do a decent job of spiral binding calendars and it is relatively inexpensive.
We find that for cards and calendars the best paper to use is matte photo paper from the manufacturer of the printer you are using. Epson’s double-sided matte is particularly good for this purpose.
Finally, overhead projector transparency sheets make excellent stained glass windows. We print the festive images and then stick them onto the windows with double sided adhesive tape which is more or less invisible. It all helps to boost the spirits when peace on earth seems a wan hope.
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Posted by terry at September 14, 2006 12:23 AM
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