Whew....

Well the invitations are finally done. But not without much drama. Right after we got engaged I found these cool do it yourself invitations that included a picture with the actual invitation being printed on vellum. I liked them because alot of people have either never meet Brian or seen us together. And after I bought the 1st box I did a test print on my home printer. No problem, the vellum printed just perfectly so I foolishly thought I was good to go. This past week I spent getting our picture figured out and pulling together the final pieces to print everything. Friday night I started the print process. I am not sure if it was due to the heat but my printer choose to not behave. First I couldn't get the labels to print correctly. They would print fine on plan paper, but stick the label paper in the printer and the alignment got all messed up. Then the printer decided that it need to grab 2 or 3 pieces at a time and Windows couldn't seem to figure out that the printer really wasn't jammed. Arghhh.... I finally resorted to copying the labels on the printer and not printing them off the computer. Next I tried printing the invitations out. The first few went just great. But it went downhill from there. Either the printer would grab too many at once or even feeding them one at a time it would fold the vellum as it pulled it in. And poor Brian, the whole time is on the phone with me trying to get me to calm down as my blood pressure is quickly rising. Finally about 1 am I gave up and decided to take the whole project to Kinko's to print in the morning.

After a few hours of sleep I got up, gathered up my stuff and went to Kinkos. Only to find out that they won't print on vellum because it jams their machines. They were nice however to refer me to another place in town that could do it. However, after driving in circles trying to find the other printer I discovered they are only open Mon-Fri 9-5. Arghh!!!!!

Sooooooo...I came home just a wee bit more frustrated and decided to give my printer one more try. I figured it I was patient, fed the pages one at a time and helped guide them through, while it might take me a few hours I could get it done. I also set up a fan in the room to keep it cool. After printing about 10 I was starting to feel better about the process, things were going smoothly. Was I ever wrong. Let's just say the whole project went to hell from there. I finally threw in the towel and called Brian in tears saying I was off to find us some new invitations. The printer seemed to print card stock just perfectly so my only hope was to find something like that. Luckily I found something I liked at Michaels and they told me that if I had any problems printing they would gladly take them back. So back I home drove with my new invitations with fingers and toes crossed that this time they would work.

I cautiously ran a few through the printer and after I was confident that all was well I printed them in small batches until they were all done. Yeah!!!! While they are not the really cool ones that I had originally picked out, they are nice invitations and even have a little detail that is similar to my dress on them.

I still wish I could have figured out a way to add the picture, since it is a great shot. I took it the weekend we got engaged. But I will figure out someway to incorporate it into our wedding. (Brian had suggested that we cover a wall at his house with the pictures since I have about 75 copies of them.)