Until it's not?
Yeah, had one of those weekends.
With the cards I make, they come with their own envelopes. Obviously, I make those, too. I like to print out my own paper for these, patterned on the inside and white on the outside.
I use my Epson R1900. The problem is that I'm not good about running it at least once a week. I usually come into the office in the morning, check stuff out, then shut down for the day, unless Brian needs me to do shipping labels. And I use the laser printer for those, unless it's USPS. Which it usually isn't.
So, when I do use the Epson, I find that I usually need to to a cleaning cycle.
Now, if you recall, I have a continuous ink system. Which has the ink tanks outside of the machine and a ribbon with tubes that go from the tanks to the special cartridges. When we set this up, Brian cut my printer so that the lid would close without intefering with the tubes.
Well, guess what happened? The ribbon wasn't in place, so the ribbon got pinched on the side. So pinched that there was air in the tube and no yellow ink was flowing. I figured out how to fix that (I needed to prime the cartridge, which sucked the air out of the ribbon and the ink started flowing again). And there had been some sort of incident with the black ink so that the air filter was blocked. I changed that out and it started working as it should. Free flowing ink.
So, I get started printing out my paper. I figure thirty 12 x 12 sheets should be plenty, I have three patterns I want to use. And after the fifth paper, I was reminded of the frustration at this point.
The printer starts to go really, really slow. I looked up online and all signs pointed to the print spooler, but nothing I did fixed the problem. I'd have to stop the printer, cancel the jobs, restart the printer and the next four or five pages would print quickly, then start. To. Slow. Down.
I even deleted all signs of the printer from my computer, removing drivers and software. Rebooting. Reinstalling. And it's still slow.
I don't think it used to be like that, it seems that it worked fine before I set up the printer as a network printer (and then undid it) a few years ago. Maybe I'll try redoing that since I have the new router, but I'm not doing it today. I have cards to make!
Which brings me to another big sigh episode.
I had all but one of the patterns cut for the first set of brand new cards. All but one. And the paper mat started sliding around in the Cameo 3. It wouldn't stop working so I turned the off button. After that, it wouldn't work. What I ended up having to do was shut down the software, unplug the Cameo, then restart the software and restart the Cameo. I did find out that pushing the "cancel" job button takes a few minutes to work. The machine stops, but the job doesn't cancel immediately.
That last pattern was the most frustrating. I worked longer getting that one done than the previous three or four. The paper kept sticking the mat and no matter how careful I was pulling them off, some of them would rip.
And another thing. The Cameo mats. On the new ones, the sticky is way too sticky. If you want to spend more money, you can buy Cameo mats that aren't so sticky. Why don't they just make them not so sticky to start with?
Well, back to work! All of these ideas running rampant through my head. I have to go act on them right now!
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