The Easy Guide To Paper Perforation

Have you ever made someone, and they handed over their business card that had a small piece of paper that tears off of the card giving you a giveaway offer or a contest alert? It does look kind of cool, especially for businesses trying to make a lasting impression simply with their business cards.

An important part of such a business card or making tickets or tear-off sections of the paper stationery such as greeting cards or coupons is without doubt the quality or kind of the perforations. Almost any kind of paper can have perforations, but the tools may differ according to the availability or the thickness of the paper.

 At ThunderBolt paper, we firmly believe in the multifaceted nature of paper and are particularly interested in spreading knowledge about anything or everything that can elevate your experience of working with paper to another level.

In this article we will discuss a few ways we can incorporate perforations in different kinds of paper without having to worry about the thickness as follows

Manual punching

At some point in your life, you must have felt the need to put some holes in loose sheets for a project or something and try them up in a thick folder. By using a simple punching machine, you can create equidistant exactly same holes to fit the dimensions of the file.

In the absence of the said punching machine, a lot of us have also tried to perforate the sheets simply with pen or pencils and that works too, just doesn't look that good.

Sewing machine

For the longest period of time, multiple sets of paper were put together by sewing them with the regular cotton or silk thread.

But if you are simply looking for some perforate red straight lines or custom shaped lines, then you can simply run a sewing machine needle over the paper or couple of papers together in one go to get perfectly equidistant perforated papers.

Needles

You already know by now that perforated paper is usually perfed so that it is easy to remove a portion or tear it off the sheet. If you do not want a lot of perforated papers, and you require only a limited number of perforations, then use a needle.

Simply grab a ruler to draw the lines that you need to be perforated along, and then simply grab and needle and punch holes with your hands.

Perforating tool

If you have ever enjoyed a pizza, then it's possible that you know how they cut along the length of the round pizza into smaller sized portions.

Perforating tool is a similar rolling blade that has equidistant punching metal pokes that is simply rolled over the paper that needs to be perforated, just like you would cut a pizza with the pizza cutting blade to obtain perfectly perforated paper.

Paper of different thicknesses can be perforated easily using this metal perforating tool.

Die cutting

If you are familiar with the process of die cutting, you can also create perforations with a die cutting machine using a perforating die.

Just as the die cutting machine is able to create clean cut custom shapes, it can also create custom shaped perforations for thick paper such as cardstock that can be removed or left as it is.

For creating custom, perforated business cards with removable bits of paper are probably made by using die cutting machines. 

Rollers

For making perforations that do not run in the form of a single straight or custom shaped line, you can use rollers too.

Metal rollers consist of cylindrical tubes with pins stuck on the surface at definite distances which are connected to a handle allowing it to roll and create perforations over a larger area. For creating cross stitching paper on thick cardstock such a ruler can be used.

The thing about paper and its accessories or tools that you find out about during paper craft only when a specific need arises, and a perforating tool is one such instrument. You may need to make a removable bookmark with a book cover or a greeting card, and small holes or perfs can make it happen. Let us know in the comments if and when you used a perforated paper or perforating tools.