Printing Woes

Well, I had a glorious run with the printer I used for Tomoe River, but that run is decidedly over.  I am now working with two other printers, but neither prints reliably or perfectly.  On one, the margins are 1 mm off, which means I'll have to adjust the templates accordingly.  the yellow balance is also slightly higher, which isn't terrible, unless I'm printing images with people on them.  I'll have to print the upcoming pin up sets on the second printer, which occasionally prints a white, background as light pink.  And neither printer can print more than one sheet at a time, so I now have to hand feed each sheet in at a painstakingly slow pace.  On a good day, the printers don't eat every other sheet of TR paper.  On a bad day, they won't print a single page at all.  And there is one design I can't get ANY of them to print at all - the owl from The Gentlemen set.  It's so frustrating.

The upshot is that I no longer have any reliability in terms of printing TR paper, and that isn't going to change anytime soon.

Because of this, I've had to change my shipping time.  I can no longer just print off a batch of TR paper without effort, on any printer I want.  I have to jump between printers, and some days none of them will print a single page.  Because I'm kind of at the mercy of the printers, I need about 5 days to get orders printed on TR paper out.  I'm really sorry about this, but my only other option was cutting TR paper entirely out of my shop, and I don't want to do that.

I've been pretty sulky about this whole printer situation, so I start watching Legend of Korra to cheer myself up.  I have become totally obsessed with it, and ended up making some personal use stationery with images from the show that I found on fan art sites.  :)

I don't have rights to the art, so it isn't something I can offer at KWS, but I love to make stationery for personal use with images from my favourite artists and shows.  I've got some cute Brian Froud ones too!

I got a really amazing note from a customer in Australia who bought some stationery to pay vet bills.  The original is thick, textured paper in light pink, and the ink is a dark crimson.  The colours didn't show up so well after being scanned, but how amazing is her writing???  I was very wowed and touched.

I sent her back some of my Korra stationery, along with a matching envelope I printed up.  I've been experimenting with printing images that match my stationery on white envelopes lately, and I'm liking it so far.  The letter below has an update about Luna, for whoever is still keeping tabs on that.

Here are some of the envelopes I've sent out lately, while I was playing with the printer.

A regular pen pal of mine sent me a letter on such gorgeous stationery that I had to share.  

Lastly, the raffle for March.  With the printer acting up so horribly, I didn't want to add to my printing to-do pile, but now it's time to get this done.  I've started with a new way of choosing the winner - I use a random number generator to give me a number, then count from both the top and bottom of the list of customers for a month.  I take the two names, then get the random number generator to pick either 1 or 2, and count from the top down to choose who wins out of the two semi-finalists.  This month, it's rx671, who beat out TamraBOrr in the semi-finals.  I've already contacted rx671, so I'm just waiting to hear back now.

Time to head out.  Have a great weekend, guys!