press the button: the highs and lows of square envelopes

When I decided over a year ago that I wanted square invitations, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I didn't know they'd cost more to mail and I sure as hell didn't know I would battle my printer for hours trying to print addresses onto them.

the dream

Let's backtrack, though. I've held hand-written envelopes in high esteem ever since I started wedding planning. But very recently, the reality of bad handwriting being anywhere near my lovely invitations started gnawing at me. I even tried using a nib pen to somehow dress my handwriting up, to no avail. I checked various etiquette sources and the preference for hand-written seems to stem from the amount of time and care it takes to write them. Well, that's easy to solve:

• I'm hand-lining the envelopes
• My address font requires choosing from a variety of glyphs for each letter, which is time-consuming
• I designed the whole freaking suite
• I'm hand-feeding the envelopes into the printer, one by one by one
• I'm printing part of the suite at home on an inkjet, which is a form of torture

So it seems I have all of my bases covered when it comes to care and time.

For the addresses I chose Burgues Script, for its calligraphic properties. It has swooshes and curls and all manners of flourishes -- ideal for faking my way to a pretty envelope. Because I know no ideal way to do this, I created individual documents for each address, setting the page size to 6.5" x 6.5", the size of my square envelopes. I fed one of my test envelopes into the tray, hit Print, and then... nothing.

"Paper Mismatch, Press Okay to Cancel."

I went to the Print Setup and tried to set the paper size to my size, but it wouldn't allow custom sizes! Oh the humanity. I could choose A6, a standard size I shirked -- why, why, why did I do that? For hours, I sat there, trying to come up with novel ways to trick my computer into printing my square envelope. Finally I decided it was InDesign's fault and typed an address in a Word document. Print.

A printed envelope came out, albeit printed on the wrong end. I examined the settings, needing to know what foul Microsoft magic made it print. It was set on Letter. I was an over-complicating idiot the whole time.

The moral of the story is: if you're using square envelopes, use the Letter size setting!

So for the next hour I sat on the floor feeding the envelopes into the printer while Kirk hit Control P. The result was glorious:

I already have an edit to make, which is this: I spelled "Crown Point" wrong on 12 invitations. The above picture illuminated this fact to me.So the real moral of the story is: order way more envelopes than you actually need. Sheesh.

Have you had any epic struggles with technology?