By: Hobie Lunin
Holiday Gifts from your Computer
If you plan to make Holiday Gifts or Cards on
your computer, you ought to start getting organized now for the projects.
Some ideas for holiday gift giving that can
be generated on your computer are tee shirts, golf shirts, sweat shirts, canvas
bags and other items using iron-on transfers.
Photo calendars, gift-wrap, stationery, posters, greeting cards, photos
for framing and other items can also be made using your PC (or Mac).
One of the projects that can take some time,
for instance, is a photo calendar. You
often receive these spiral bound kind from various vendors. They hang on a vertical surface and measure
11x17 in use but convenient fold to letter size for mailing. What takes the time is finding the right
selection of photos. If they are not
digitized, they will have to be made so by scanning or taken to a photo shop
and put on disk.
All the items that require the iron-on
process will take less time to make but there is some effort in deciding what
the text or graphics will be. In
addition to the above-mentioned tee shirts and golf shirts, sweat shirts,
canvas bags and any other light or white colored fabric items will lend
themselves to personalization of one kind or another. If you are new to this, you might just consider putting the name
of the recipient on some kind of shirt.
Tee shirts are great for kids and can be purchased reasonably at places
like Wal-Mart, Michaels and AC Moore (where you can get canvas bags to
decorate). Golf shirts (with collars)
are more suitable for adults and they run about $10 at Wal-Mart.
Information on printing on shirts is
available from my web site (articles from May 3, 2001 and July 5, 2001).
The easiest plan is to use white articles of
clothing or other light colored canvas type stuff. These will work well with regular, cool type iron-on paper. Type the recipient’s name in Word and put it
in a text box. Select the typeface and
a color for the font. Using the ruler
above the typing area have the length be a suitable size for the size shirt
making it in a large enough font to be seen from several feet. You will need to flip in over before
printing on the transfer sheet and directions to do that are in Word Help.
For those who would like to try to use dark
colored shirts, you can use iron-on transfers for colored shirts, which have
been available for a few years now.
Instead of just transferring the ink by ironing the back of the printed
transfer sheet, these peel from a backing before ironing and you end up ironing
them from the front with a piece of supplied parchment paper to prevent damage
from the iron. If you want to iron a
dark color directly onto a darker
shirt, there can be some problems. If
whatever you have chosen has a white edge or frame about it, there won't be a
problem, however if you try to cut to the edge of something dark, when you
iron, the underlying white may show around the edge slightly depending upon the
heat and the material. This can be
carefully retouched with indelible magic marker of a matching color. It would be best to try out a smaller
pattern on a test piece of material before proceeding with the project. There is no question though, that printouts
on darker color shirts look great and there is no need to reverse the text
before printing. Just remember that
although that paper seems very thin, you must remove the backing before
ironing.
This year there is something new available,
small gift bags you can personalize directly by printing on your computer (not
iron-on). I saw these at Office Max.
As for calendars, after you have selected the
photos, you will need to get glossy paper with matte finish on the opposite
side. The calendar part can be made
from a number of card programs or M/S Publisher. The picture and the calendar will be organized such that they are
180 degrees different from front to back.
This means you have to know which way you printer will print to get the
right orientation. There are kits
available to make the calendars that have the right paper, the holes prepunched
and the spiral binding all included with a transparent sheet for the
cover. They are available at most of
the office suppliers. One brand is
Avery kit number 3278.
Print them at a high resolution (1200dpi, if
you can). Make sure you have selected
“fit to page”, and be sure to allow them to dry before letting anything touch
them. It is a good idea to print the
calendar side of each sheet before printing the picture. If you do not have a calendar program,
please write me for suggestions.
As for greeting cards, there are numerous
programs to make these in and you probably already have one in your
computer. The question is what paper to
use. For cards, I suggest the greeting
card paper with gloss one side and scored for folding just once. You can buy this kind of paper with the
envelopes enclosed in the package. This
will allow you to make a nice card that can be personalized. Envelopes may also be printed neatly and can
look like they are hand written by using a type font such as Mistral.
Cards may also be generated in some word
processing programs such as Word or WordPerfect if you do not have a regular
card program. Envelopes can be printed
from these programs as well. A column
on using Microsoft Publisher to make greeting cards for the Holidays will
appear in this space shortly.
Hobie Lunin is a consultant and
instructor. He can be reached at
mouseclix2@yahoo.com. Previous articles
are at http://mouseclix.tripod.com