How to Print Our Bible Printables
~ Today’s tutorial and Scripture art were designed to teach you how to print printables – so you can beautifully surround your heart and home with vibrant Scripture. ~
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Since we get lots of “how to print printables” questions, we thought it would be helpful to publish our best practices for printing at home and also through an online printer!
So today’s post is a little different from our norm.
But you know that we are all-Bible all the time, so of course we first want to share a verse with you.
Deuteronomy 11:18 (CSB): “Imprint these words of mine on your hearts and minds, bind them as a sign on your hands, and let them be a symbol on your foreheads.
But we can’t stop there because this is good stuff …
Deuteronomy 11:19-21 (CSB): Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your city gates, so that as long as the heavens are above the earth, your days and those of your children may be many in the land the LORD swore to give your ancestors.
THAT is why we encourage displaying Scripture in your home, in your office, in your planner – well, anywhere and everywhere!
We believe in it so much that we send our email subscribers a free Bible printable every-other Thursday!
Are you an Insider yet? (If you’re not, what are you waiting for?)
Our mission is to surround your heart and home with God’s Word, and creating Scripture art that you can print on demand is a major way we do that!
So now that you have tons of Scripture art at your fingertips, it’s time to put them to good use (like in these 20 clever ways). If you plan to print these at home, we have a few tips to help them turn out beautifully.
(Psst. You can find all of our printables, including art, cards, and Scripture writing plans, along with physical products in our Etsy shop.)
How to Print Our Printables
{1} The Printer
The first step to a great at-home printing experience is a quality printer. It’s not possible to test the full range of personal printers available on the market (there are so many!) but we have had good experiences with Epson workforce printers. Epson has a wide variety of printers and we have been happy with the quality of our prints when using premium paper.
If you don’t have a good home printer, keep reading for other options below.
Tip: look for printers that have individual ink cartridges.
{2} The Paper
The quality of the paper you choose will have a big impact on how vibrant your printable prints. If you are printing art to hang on a wall, we recommend this premium paper or printer watercolor paper. If you are printing greeting cards or bookmarks, then you definitely want to choose a heavy cardstock. Calendars and verse journals will work on any of these papers, depending on how you plan to use them.
{3} The Settings
Finally, the way your printer is configured can drastically affect your results! Your default setting may not be the best choice for our printables, so take a minute to check the following 4 settings.
1 – Our printables are designed to fit to the edges of 8.5×11 paper. To ensure that it lines up correctly, you will need to check the box that says “fit to paper” (NOT “fit to printable area”). Or it may be worded “fill page” (NOT “shrink to fit”). This box is found under “more settings” for most printers.
While you’re there, double check the following: landscape vs. portrait depending on what you are printing.
2 – Some printers will have a “Save Ink/Toner” setting automatically checked. Uncheck it for our printables, so it will print with richer colors. (The examples below show an Epson printer. Yours may look different.)
3 – You can also click on “Properties” and look for a “Quality” option (see below). Change it to “High Quality” instead of standard.
4 – Lastly, we’ve learned that most at-home printers don’t handle a stack of thick paper very well. So you may have to feed thicker paper in one-at-a-time to prevent paper jams.
Tips for Printing at an Online Office Supply Store
Of course you can print any of our downloads at home on your regular ol’ printer, but if yours isn’t cutting it, a local and/or online printer store can make a big difference!
We’ve found that the following method is particularly helpful for multiple pages (like our calendars and printable journals), as well as the art pieces you want especially crisp and clear (like vivid watercolor to display in a frame). It can also help provide a more polished look for items that you want to gift to others such as our thank you card set or all occasion card bundle – just be sure to choose cardstock as the paper option for these.
Below you will find an example of walking through the process of printing our Monthly Calendar at our local Staples store – so you can see just how easy and customizable it is!
(Bear in mind that companies change their websites often, so the screenshots below may look slightly different than what you see.)
We hope you find this step-by-step tutorial helpful!
1 – Visit Staples.com and hover your mouse over “Services.” That will bring up a big list of offerings, so look for “Printing Services.”
Staples offers both in-store pickup and delivery on most of their printed items, so keep that in mind as you are going through the process. In-store pickup is usually free, but if you don’t have a store near you they can ship it too!
2 – Once you’re at the Printing Services page, hover over “Document Printing.” We chose “Simple Prints” for this tutorial since we’re not looking for any special features. We want to print each month on a separate page to use as a family calendar in the kitchen, so we don’t need binding. You could peruse their other features if you wanted to them to bind your prints together or see more options for paper quality.
3 – The file upload process was fairly simple. We chose “My Computer” and found where we had saved the printable downloads.
You do have a special folder on your computer where you keep all of your Bible printables so you can find them easily, right? {grin}
4 – This calendar we are printing is a pretty large file so it is split into two PDFs. One helpful feature was that Staples let us select and upload the first file, then come back and add the second, just in case we forgot to select both.
5 – You may need to zoom out so you can see the titles of the files to make sure they’re in the right order. The box was fairly small on our computer screen. Just click the magnifying glass at the top of your browser to zoom in or out. Since we happen to be printing separate sheets instead of a bound book, it won’t matter this time, but if you are printing something double sided or that will be bound together, you’ll want to make sure it’s in the right order. Then click “Continue.”
6 – Once our file was uploaded, we could see all of the printing options available. You can change the paper size, but this printable was designed to be 8.5 x 11 so that was already perfect. You can also change the paper quality if needed. You also have the option to print in black and white and add binding, which we didn’t want to do this time.
7 – One setting you’ll want to double check is whether or not it is single or double sided. Since we want to use these as individual monthly calendar pages, we made sure to select single-sided so they wouldn’t print on the backs of the month before.
8 – Finally, we chose the closest store and scheduled our pick up! (But we could have also had it mailed to us.)
And there you have it.
Better, more vibrant prints here we come!
Please let us know if you have any questions. We are here to help because we want you to surround your heart and home with radiant Scripture!
*My prayer for you is … that this blog will inspire you to open your Bible every single day to seek God’s face and write His Word on your heart – because HE’S the key to lasting heart change!
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