I may or may not have implied that there was a bit of stress involved with putting together our Save the Date’s…
Don’t worry, it all turned out fine! I just like to be dramatic. You see, this is how it went down (2 weeks ago…):
On Thursday, Justin and I picked up some clear Avery labels…return address and 2"x4” shipping labels. For convenience’s sake, I had determined that we’d just print sheets of address labels with pretty font. I found a great font and downloaded it for FREE on Fontspace.com. Done and done.
Not so much.
To make a long story short, the instructions on the labels say to print a test sheet before printing on the actual labels. Easy enough, right? We put a test sheet in the printer…the labels looked perfect when we held them up against the real deal. Ok, we’re good to go. However, when we put the label sheet in the printer, they came out COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. What the…
At first, I figured I must have hit something on my keyboard and it was my fault. So, we tried another test sheet. It looked perfect…again. So, we put in the real sheet again. And, guess what? It came out wrong…AGAIN!
I walked away for the night, and poured myself a glass of wine. I was frustrated.
Fast forward to Friday night. It was time to tackle the labels again. We went through the same process…and ruined three more sheets of labels. Cursing may or may not have been involved. I started pulling at my hair. Justin immediately tells me to get the heck out of the room before I smash my computer into pieces.
I took my frustrations out on the labels instead...
So then, I took a breath, and then frantically began to scroll through the template options on my computer…and thanked my lucky stars that they had the right size of envelope included. We tested the printer on one of our precious envelopes (we have 93 to send, out of 100 in the package…so we can’t make many mistakes!)…it looked great.
Insert sigh of relief. This can work…
Except for the fact that we now have to print every single envelope one…at…a…time.
We opened a bottle of wine (sensing a trend???) and got to work. Justin assembled the cards, I typed addresses and printed the envelopes.
More than four hours later, we were done! Well, 2/3 of the way done at least. I’m still missing a few addresses…
Want to see them? Well, too bad! I am going to keep you in suspense for Part 2 for the big reveal!
Did you have any frustration involved in making Save the Date’s or invitations?
We had much frustration - nothing ever seemed to be simple. *le sigh* But now I have a question, why did you have to type each envelope individually? Would the template not allow mail merge because wow, that really is not fun! At least they're done and hopefully on their way out the door!! :)
ReplyDeleteI despise labels....I always have the exact same problem!
ReplyDeleteI have no patience with technology when it starts to go wrong! I can totally feel your pain! Glad you were able to work around it and find something that works for you.
ReplyDeleteStephanie -
ReplyDeleteGooood question! Sadly, my Mac is a piece of you-know-what, and when prompted to do a relatively simple task, it sometimes rebels against me. I'm going to have to try to figure out how to calm it down before the invitations...haha!
This is why I am just going to write out the addresses. There is no way my technologically incapable self can figure out this label-printing business!
ReplyDeletePS I loved all your photos in the post - way to tell a story with pictures :)
Girl. Printers are so freaking ridiculous, right? We (read: I) hand fed our envelopes through our printer and it suuucked. We wasted probably 30 envelopes because of the stupid thing. Grr...
ReplyDeleteAlso, Josh has a Mac and we had no problem putting our addresses into some sort of mail merge thing-y. Let me know if you're interested and I can get him to write up some instructions :)
Oh yes, my STD's were a nightmare! They were totally fine on the printer at home that we created them on. But I knew printing 100 of them on my little home printer was going to take forever and a lot of ink! So I decided to print them on the $10,000 printer at work that would spit them out in seconds flat and with much better quality.
ReplyDeleteThe problem? The printer at work had a totally different result on the colors than what we created at home. I spent a good hour or two changing the colors over and over and matching them up against my color swatches to get them right. Then when that was fixed, for some stupid reason, the printer 'tilted' the card stock when it printed so the design was at a slant. I played with it forever trying to figure out what was wrong and then came up with the brilliant idea to simply select the entire design in Adobe Illustrator and 'rotate' it slightly to the side so that it looked 'tilted' on the computer. Guess what? It printed straight on the printer! Go figure!