Foiling cardstock

I had a bit of a play recently with cardstock, as the Brother printer I was eyeing on had a drop in price. I already had all the other materials on hand, purchased previously

Printer:Brother L2305W

Laminator: GBC Polar

Foil: Decofoil

Cardstock: Quill 210gsm from Officeworks

I tried the Cricut print and cut feature, but it does not cut because it is unable to detect the black on black cardstock. Asking in the group, they suggested printing another white paper on it. I did print and stick the sides but then the paper moved as it was not all stuck properly, it would be cumbersome to properly stick the entire white paper.

Moving on, I then decided to use Cricut to cut cardstock to standard A5 size.

It would be up to the printer to cut the A5 cardstock.

I tried to design in Inkscape since it was free, but the print out was not exactly shown on the Inkscape design, it was somehow off. There is also a margin gap at the end of the paper, 1cm gap.

I then tried GIMP (another free software) but the print quality was surprisingly even worse off.

I installed Illustrator (free for 7 days) and the quality is as good as Inkscape, but the margin at the end of the paper was still evident.

I researched and it is not possible to print borderless cardstock, it would need to be sent to commercial printers, with bleed settings done to the file.

The only way was to test print, and resize the design smaller so that it looked symmetrical once printed.

The printer also printed some marks on my white cardstock (200gsm), but it did not consistently print those marks on all of my cardstock. Enquiring support, they said this model does not support 200gsm cardstock. The models that do support 200gsm - HL-L2445DW HL-L2460DW, HL-L2460DWXL

The foiling test also had different results.

Testing with Decofoil, even different foil paper had different results. My rose gold did better than my silver paper. I also had another TRX brand from eBay, which just did poorly.

All these were with the 100mic setting on the laminator.

Sometimes it was able to fix the missing spots by running it over again, but sometimes that didn't work.