How to Make Funeral Prayer Cards

What you need

Nothing on this list is specialized. Most of it is at any office supply store, and the trimmer is the only thing worth a special trip.

Before you buy anything, ask the funeral director whether prayer cards are already included in the service package. Many are, and families regularly pay twice in the same week for the same object. If theirs are included, use them and spend the evening somewhere else.

The process, start to finish

1. 1

   Settle the four pieces of content first

   A prayer card carries a photograph, a name, two dates, and 40 to 70 words of text. Have all four decided and written down before you open any software. Changing the verse after the layout is built means redoing the layout.

   Sixty short options grouped by tradition are on funeral prayer card verses. If the family is writing its own, two honest sentences beat a borrowed poem.

2. 2

   Make one card at exact size

   Create a document 2.5 inches wide by 4.25 inches tall. Enter the numbers; do not drag a box until it looks right. Set the margins inside it to a quarter inch on all four sides and keep every piece of text inside that.

   Decide now whether the photograph runs to the edge or sits inside a border. At home, choose the border. Full-bleed printing is where kitchen-table cards go wrong.

3. 3

   Build the front

   One photograph, head and shoulders, taken when they looked like themselves. Underneath it, the full name as the family says it, then the birth and death dates written out. Nothing else. Resist adding a verse to the front; the back is for that.

4. 4

   Build the back on a second page

   A heading, usually In Loving Memory or Pray for the soul of. The name and dates again if they were not on the front. Then the verse, centered, with the lines broken where a person would pause reading it aloud. Attribution underneath in smaller type. Many families close with the church and the service date, which is useful years later when nobody remembers when it was.

5. 5

   Lay six cards on a letter sheet

   Three columns across, two rows down, cards upright, half an inch of margin on the left and right and about an inch and a quarter top and bottom. Butt the cards against each other with no gap so that one cut serves two cards. Full detail on that arrangement is in the next section.

6. 6

   Print one test sheet on plain paper

   Print the front sheet, write TOP and an arrow on the leading edge, then feed it back in and print the back sheet. Hold the result up to a lamp. You are checking two things: that the backs sit over the fronts, and that the fronts are where the trimmer will expect them.

   Do this before you touch the card stock. Card stock is the expensive part.

7. 7

   Print the real run, one sheet at a time

   Set the paper type to card stock or heavy so the printer slows the feed, and the quality to best or photo. Print all the fronts first. Let inkjet sheets sit flat for a few minutes, then restack them in the same order and print the backs. Add three or four extra sheets to the run so that a spoiled card costs nothing.

8. 8

   Trim, round the corners, and count

   Cut all the vertical lines through the whole stack first, then the horizontals. Round the corners if you bought the punch. Count them into stacks of twenty-five with a rubber band around each, which makes the count at the visitation table effortless.

Laying out the sheet

The arithmetic on a letter sheet is unforgiving, so it is worth having it in front of you.

You will find eight-up layouts for the standard 2.5 by 4.25 card advertised by print shops. Two cards laid sideways measure exactly 8.5 inches, the full width of the paper, so there is no margin at all. A commercial press manages that by printing on oversized stock and trimming the sheet down. A home printer grips the sheet by its edges and physically cannot put ink there. If you want eight to a sheet at home, use the 2.5 by 3.5 card, which fits comfortably.

Butt the cards, do not space them

If the cards touch each other, one pass of the trimmer finishes two cards at once and the edges match. If you leave a gap between them, every line needs two cuts and a thin strip to be removed, which doubles the work and doubles the chances of drift. Gaps are only necessary when artwork runs to the edge, and at home it should not.

Mark the cut lines in the margin

Put short tick marks in the white margin at the top, bottom and both sides, lined up with each cut. Never draw the lines across the cards themselves. Set the marks in light gray, hairline weight, and they vanish into the trim. Dimensions, bleed and safe areas for every card size are on prayer card size.

Card stock and printer settings

Paper weight labeling in the United States is genuinely confusing, because the same number means different things for different paper categories. What matters is the word cover.

Inkjet and laser handle this differently

A laser printer puts toner on the surface and it is dry the moment it comes out, which makes it the easier machine for double-sided cards. Never feed glossy photo paper through a laser printer; the coating is not made for the heat.

An inkjet gives a better photograph but needs matte or lightly coated card stock and a few minutes to dry before the sheets are stacked or run through again. Heavy ink coverage on one side will curl the sheet. Pressing the finished cards flat under a stack of books overnight fixes it. The same paper and finishing advice applied to the booklet is on funeral program printing.

Getting the back to line up with the front

This is where home-printed cards fail, and it is entirely solvable in one test sheet.

Print the sides separately

Automatic duplex pulls the sheet back through a tight loop, and heavy card stock either jams or comes out creased. Print all the fronts, take the stack out, and feed it back in to print the backs. It takes two minutes longer and removes the whole problem.

Learn which way your printer flips

Take a plain sheet, write FRONT on it with an arrow pointing to the top edge, and print the back layout onto it. Look at where the arrow ends up. If the back comes out mirrored left to right, then column one on the front lines up with column three on the back, and your back layout has to run in reverse column order. Every printer is different, and the setting is often buried under a long-edge or short-edge option.

The lamp test

Hold the double-printed test sheet up to a bright lamp or a window. You will see straight through the card stock well enough to check that the back sits over the front. Adjust the back layout by whatever the gap is, and test again. Two rounds is normal.

Why a border saves you

A card with a white or cream margin around the photograph tolerates a sixteenth of an inch of drift invisibly. A full-bleed card shows the same drift as a white sliver down one edge on every card in the stack. If you want edge-to-edge photographs, that is the point at which a print shop earns its money.

Cutting them straight

A guillotine or rotary trimmer, not scissors. Scissors cannot hold a line over four and a quarter inches, and the eye reads an uneven edge instantly even when it cannot say why.

If there is no trimmer, a metal ruler and a fresh craft knife on a cutting mat will do it. Hold the ruler firmly, make three light passes rather than one deep one, and cut one sheet at a time. It is slower and the result is just as good.

Rounded corners

A corner rounder punch costs very little and is the change that makes a home-cut card feel finished. Punch one or two cards at a time and all four corners of each. It also removes the sharp points that catch in a wallet, which is the reason printed holy cards have had rounded corners for a century.

What goes wrong, and the fix

When not to do it at home

There are three good reasons to hand this to someone else, and none of them are a failure.

The visitation is sooner than you think

The real deadline is the visitation, not the funeral, and in most American services the visitation is the evening before. That pulls the cards forward by a full day. If it is already Thursday and the visitation is Friday at five, a local print shop with same-day service is the right call. So is doing nothing: hand out the program, and let the cards follow later with the thank-you notes. Nobody counts cards at the door.

You want lamination, or edge-to-edge photographs

Gloss lamination is what gives a holy card its particular feel, and it cannot be done at home. Neither can true full-bleed printing. A shop will do both, usually overnight, and the price difference on a run of a hundred and fifty is smaller than most families expect.

This week has already asked enough of you

You are allowed to do less than you think. No part of a funeral depends on a prayer card: not the liturgy, not the burial, not anyone’s memory of the day. A plain card with a name, two dates and one honest line is kept for decades. A crowded one goes in a drawer. And a service with no cards at all is not missing anything.

If you do want the set to match, that is the one part worth handing off. Reposa takes the photograph, the name and dates and the words you have chosen, and produces the prayer cards and the funeral program from the same file, in the same typeface, with the bleed and margins already correct. You get a print-ready PDF to take to a shop or run at home, and the six-up sheet is laid out for you. What goes on each side of the card, and how many to have printed, is on funeral prayer cards.