I’ve realized that one of the things I can’t live without at 30 is my printer. Stick with me. I know printing things from a computer seems so 90s, but the days of grainy, scratchy photo printouts and randomly eating paper while trying to print out a bar graph for your geography homework are long gone. Thankfully, printers have evolved and are now infinitely useful in our everyday lives.
Having a good printer gives you endless opportunities to organize and decorate your home. I also use it to entertain the kids, to do a ton of different crafts, create invitations, print photos, make personalized gifts, and the list goes on. Having a reliable, good quality printer will give you more and more! In this post, I’ll show you three ways I use my printer to improve my home and make my life a little easier.
And I can do all this from my phone and easily send it to the printer via the Canon app. It’s literally never been easier to use a printer. So if you have memories of
1. Family photo wall
Firstly, the print quality of my Canon printer from Very.co.uk means I can print out photos to frame and honestly, to me they look just as good in a frame as professionally printed photos. I can’t tell the difference. If you want to get those photos off the endless camera roll quickly and easily and enjoy them at home, having your own printer is a must. I’ve already swapped a couple of these photos for newer ones I’ve taken (you can play spot the difference with the photos below) because it’s so easy to print out your latest favourite photos and pop them into the frame. What do you do with your leftover photos? I’ll be making a family album out of them soon – there’s another reason you need a printer at home!
To make my photo wall, I used the Canon Easy PhotoPrint app. In the photo layouts, I chose Borderless x2 for A4. After choosing two images from my favourites folder, I resized the images to create photos that were slightly larger than the frame size. Then, I sent them off to be printed.
30 seconds later I cut the paper in half down the middle to create two separate photos, taped them to the back of the frame to hold them in place with washi tape/masking tape, and placed the frame back in the frame. Now your photos are ready to hang.
I get great joy from passing by them every day and all our visitors are drawn to them. It’s so lovely to see other people enjoying the photos as much as I do!
2. Labels for spice jars
To be honest, we have two spice drawers that are a complete mess. Organizing them all is on my to-do list, but to start, I made labels for some of the herbs and spices we use the most. It’s a super easy upgrade, and once all the spices are labeled, you can just take them out of the drawer of doom and store them somewhere easy to access. All while keeping your kitchen looking beautiful!
I used my printer and the Cricut Maker to create these labels. You can print and cut them if you don’t have access to the Cricut.
After you design your first label, copy and paste before changing the text for each of your herbs and spices. Make sure the size and position are the same for each label to give them a consistent look. Print the labels on an A4 sheet of sticker paper and use your Cricut machine to cut them out or cut them by hand. Clean and fill the empty jars and stick the corresponding label on each one.
3. Easy Matisse-inspired painting by numbers
My oldest son has never been into painting or coloring. Our craft activities need to be more adult-led and much more collaborative. Something he has always struggled with is the pressure to get things “right,” so intricate coloring pictures are often quite a challenge for him and he tends to give up easily when everything doesn’t go as planned.
I’ve been trying to find ways to help him become more confident in his own creativity, so I thought a very simple Matisse-inspired paint-by-numbers would help him focus on his fine motor skills, as well as give him the opportunity to explore color and create without the need for perfection. I couldn’t find anything that already existed that looked easy and didn’t require too much pressure, so I decided to design something myself. I drew a very simple picture using those fun Matisse-style cutouts and printed some of them out for our next craft session.
I seriously can’t believe how well this worked! He loved the irregular, messy shapes that could be both chaotic and fun. He sat down and painted two pictures, which is not like him. For now, I’ve left the painting by numbers part up to him (he loves reading and recognizing numbers and assigning his own colors to them), but in the future I might add some boxes as color prompts to keep it interesting for him.
They are super easy to design in a simple paint program and you can save them to a folder on your phone and print them out anytime when you need an interesting craft activity for a rainy day!
