Printing your own acetates ...

Hello! Alexa here! Glad to be with you, this sunny November morning ...

Some of you may be thinking of putting together a December Daily, like that of Ali Edwards, or a Journal Your Christmas, as suggested by Shimelle. I've noticed a number of questions about acetates this year, as Ali is using them in her album inbetween her foundation pages (see here). These are purely decorative, don't contain any journalling, and are often quite expensive to buy. If you have a printer, it is perfectly possible to make your own. You don't need to have Photoshop to do it either - if you can use Word, you'll be fine. Here's how ...

First, you'll need printable acetate: stationers of various types will have these, and look for the magic words "inkjet printer" ...

When you take these out of the box or packet, you will notice that one side feels smooth and the other slightly rough - it's the rough side you need to print onto, so insert it the correct way into your printer. Next you'll need some images. There are many sites offering free images; this one, Vintage Stampers Freebies, has some lovely vintage ones of snow and Christmassy scenes, if you scroll down below the wedding photos:

Left click on an image to open it in a new window, and then right click and choose Save Image As, in order to download it into a folder on your computer. Next, open a blank page in Word. You'll need to place your image on the page, so go to the toolbar at the top, and choose Image > Picture > From File, then locate your chosen image wherever you stored it, and click Insert.

This will pop your image onto your page. You'll see that it has a bounding box around it (if not, click on it), which shows little circles on the corners and in the middle of each side. These let you resize the image: hold down Shift, place your cursor on one of the corner ones, and drag it in or out to make your image smaller or larger.

You might like to add some text, or a date. Use the Up and Down Arrow keys to move your cursor to where you want the text to start, play around with the font and size (see your Toolbar) till you are happy, and choose a colour from the font colour box (the large A underlined) ...

Now you can print it onto the rough side of the acetate and trim it to the size you need for your album. I find the acetates quite sturdy both for hole punching and using with the Bind-It-All, especially if I slip a piece of white paper behind so I can see more clearly what I'm doing. These cost a fraction of the cost of commercially produced ones, which makes them a winner in my book! If you'd like to further decorate them with inks, then Stazon works well on acetate - leave it to dry for ten or so minutes before handling.

Hoping there's something useful for you here, and Happy-Almost-Weekend!

Comments

[jayne]

oooh ill come back to this and read it properly. looks interesting x

[Lynne V]

What a great idea, I love using acetate overlays, but they are expensive.

I shall try making my own now.

[Wild Roze]

Thank you this is awesome. Am def. going to try this one! Thank you as well for the excellent visuals, as a "stipid" cyber skilled user this is most helpfull.

[Mandy]

I love acetates too... thanks for the great post.
Mandy

[Eleanor]

A really excellent tutorial, thanks! Now somewhere, in a box, I have some printable acetate...
xx

[Carmen]

Fabulous tutorial Alexa. I tried acetates once but the ink just kept sliding off - however it was glossy both sides so I now know where i went wrong!