Weddingbee Blog

When we first set out to DIY some pretty basic save the dates, we figured it would take a few hours. A full night, tops. After all, we scooped up the paper and envelopes on sale, and our old (but still kickin’) printer was full of ink. Plus, I have Photoshop (even though I don’t know too much about it other than to crop, paste and use the magnetic-lasso-thing for who-knows-what).

Our problem was motivation, folks. We had NONE. And when you have a wedding on a Saturday evening in June, it’s probably good to get those crafty suckers out as soon as humanly possible.

So finally, late into a fateful night, we began the DIY STD quest after giving in to peer pressure that mostly came from my mother. Mr. Jam whistled as he brewed the coffee, while I played with photo printing software, my computer blaring a happy Pandora Station to get us in the paper-crafting mood. FYI: That station was Scissor Sisters.

Mere minutes later, the scene wasn’t so pretty:

Mr. Jam cursed the computer and frustratedly punched at computer keys doing Lord-knows-what. The computer/printer/paper/everything decided to take over the office and do whatever it wanted. I swore off DIY STDs forever.

Let me just tell you that we had been planning on DIY-ing our invites, too. After this? Not so likely.

Turns out our printer, which could be called a bit of a dinosaur since it’s 6 years old, doesn’t do borderless printing. At all. Even if you click the box that says “borderless printing.”

Crappy iPhone picture makes these photos look like even more a hot mess.

Note the white borders, which are clearly not borderless.

After stalking message boards and asking everybody and their brother about borderless printing (even if they had no clue what we were talking about), Mr. Jam and I decided to throw in the towel and buy a new printer. Unfortunately, every single employee in the printer departments of local office stores told us that borderless printing just wasn’t an option…at least, not on our budget. Everyone suggested we give up.

Being completely hard-headed and a little bit naive about the whole situation, we forged on to my parents’ house to test out their new printer, which is in the HP Photosmart family. My dad claimed it could do borderless printing on any size, and my mom always has a stash of Diet Coke to calm our nerves in stressful crafting situations.

My dad being so serious and  working hard on the printer we dragged into living room (yes, everything pictured was used in creating the STDs…even the flashlight) and my little bro “helping.”

And even though we hit more bumps and white borders along the way…we finally did it. FINALLY. Sure, we could have used a paper cutter of some sort to cut the white edges off 83 cards, and sure, we could have taped each little paper to a regular-sized piece of paper to trick the printer even more, but we just wanted easy, borderless printing. Simple as that. We are lazy DIY-ers, I think.

We are still delirious thinking about it actually happening. Take that, printing department workers who said it would never be!

A much happier part 2 coming up soon, but first tell me: Did YOU struggle with a printing project from hell? Did your printer claim to be borderless, but really it wasn’t? Did you say screw it, and use the paper cutter on every single piece? And if you have a tried-and-true borderless printer, fess up!