A Love Story – The Saga Continues

Well, I’ve gotten some questions regarding this post...it was a few weeks back and I was just starting to work on printing my invitation suite out. The choice for me to DIY my wedding invitation was a simple one for me to make...really it was. I scrap book, or used to back when I had free time, and so the thought of putting my invitations together didn’t faze me one little bit. Although to be perfectly honest, I thought that the design piece of the process would be the painful part since I’d never done anything like that before. But printing, cutting, and assembling the paper products? No problem.

Of course, that was many stress headaches, many curse words, both muttered under my breath and yelled out loud, and many urges for a margarita later...and here I am.

And yes, the printer beast is just about to kill me.

There’s just no rhyme or reason to when the printer will cooperate and when it won’t. I know that this seems totally unreasonable and against all known logic, but it seems that the printer prefers to print the best during the middle of the day. You know, when I’m at work. I know what you’re wondering – how do I know that that’s when it prints the best? Don’t go all crazy on me, I didn’t play hooky or anything, I simply printed ALL weekend long last weekend and the darn thing worked fine during the middle of the day.

Too early in the morning – it eats my paper. Too late at night – it stops printing halfway through a print, which in a sense also eats my paper since you can’t print over it or finish just half of the image...

Last week, I determined that the paper’s opalescent quality was bad for the wheels on the printer which grab the paper...so I made a blank 10 page document and called it “printer cleaning” that I can run after each set of printing with normal paper to help clean the wheels. This worked good for about a day. I could print 5 pages off...then run the cleaner. Print 5 more...run the cleaner. Tedious, but it worked.

Yeah, I’m down to 3 pages now...not really sure what happened. But I need 80 invitations printed and each piece of paper has to be run through the printer FOUR times to get all the printing done...you can do the math on your own, or you can pour me a margarita...I need it, and trust me – I’ve EARNED it!

Is there good news? Maybe. This last weekend, since I was at home during the “prime printing times” I was able to finish 45 of my 80 pieces. WOOT! And although the optimist in me is shouting out “That means that you’re more than halfway through!” the pessimist in me is reaching over trying to slap the sh*t out of the optimist. That happy girl needs to shut up!

If I can manage somehow to finish the last two sides of the cards that I did manage to work on last night, without ruining anymore, I might be able to say that I’ll hit the 60 mark by this weekend. And that would leave me with only 20 left. I’m not so certain now that I can’t un-invite people just so I don’t have to print off anymore of these DA*N invitations.

The other bit of good news? I love them. They are beautiful. If I didn’t love them, this would all be a cruel joke...

Anyone else having invitation problems? I seriously cannot recommend printing on cover weight Stardream paper out of your own house. Does anyone have any tips for me? Things to try that I haven’t thought of yet?