Hiya, it’s Emma From Pumpkinsputnik here. I got to test the ‘Invitation Greeting Card Delux Heavy Weight Lightly Textured 290g’ (quite a mouthful!) and the ‘Creative Stickers Matt A4’ from Photo Paper Direct for the GCM.

As a designer who makes notebooks and greetings cards, I was very interested to see what the card would be like.  I’ve always found it hard to find decent card to use which was heavy enough to give a professional finish but would fit through my printers – I plumped for watercolour card in the end as it gives me the result I’m looking for and I use it for the covers of my notebooks as well as for note cards.

Firstly I was really pleased with the weight of this card from Photo Paper Direct – at 290g it’s not much thinner than the watercolour card I use.  It has a lovely texture too, subtle but enough to notice.  I’m lucky enough to use a large HP Photosmart Pro printer which I use for most of my products, so I used it first to test the card – it can take any size card up to A3 and 2.5mm thick, so it easily managed this one.

The results are lovely, the colours are really clear and bright and the detail is superb.  The card only seems to come in A5 size, which I can use in my HP without any problem and print edge to edge, it does limit the size of your finished card to A6 or smaller though.  I also have a small Canon all-in-one that I use mostly for office printing, but I thought I’d give it a go too, just to compare the difference.  Unfortunately the Canon won’t do borderless printing on A5 so it didn’t really work with my designs – however the quality of print was still pretty good and the colours bright.

So, overall I was very impressed with the card, the quality and finish are great, very professional and reasonably priced too.  I would consider using it for greetings cards in the future, but not for the notebook covers.

I also got a couple of sheets of A4 sticker paper to test.  I’ve never used this kind of sticker paper before so didn’t really know what to expect.  The paper is a lovely quality again, very bright white and smooth.  I shrunk some of my designs down to small sticker-size and printed them on my HP for a good quality print and I didn’t really lose much detail at all.  I don’t have a fancy shape cutter, so I used my guillotine and corner-cutter to make them my signature square with rounded corners.  I think they look pretty good and would easily stand up to my Moo stickers.

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GIVEAWAY

We have a pack of 12 blank heavy weight greetings cards as reviewed, plus some of Emma’s lovely cards and stickers to give away. To enter, just visit the Craft Paper section of the PPD website and leave a comment here saying what paper you’d most like to try. Giveaway closes at 12pm on Sunday 12th September when we’ll pick a winner at random. Good luck!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Competitions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.