Announcing...

I had quite the time with Mandy's birth announcements. I am happy to say they are all done and in the mail. It was supposed to be a stress-less project! I started the birth announcements months before she was born, playing around with different designs, downloading cool fonts, and waiting for a baby to have an announcement for. When she was born, I took a picture the day we got home from the hospital, put it into my ready made design (that is the card pictured in yellow). I had a company online that would print 65 postcard, double-sided on high gloss card stock for $13.00. My personal assistant (Tawny) found the company and it sounded ideal! I uploaded my design and 4 hours later, it finally went through. 2 days later, I got an email proof back and found that none of my cool downloaded fonts had gone through. I was totally not thinking straight! It was going to cost an additional $25 for the company to change the fonts, so I tried uploading the file again. I tried for 4 days in a row with no luck -- dial-up Internet just can't handle a 6MB file.
I canceled my order and tried plan B... print the post card out on my printer and have color copies made on card stock. I went to the copy place and paid for the copies, but was really unhappy with the grainy, cheap look. My kind husband said they looked like crap and why didn't I just have them printed off as pictures at Costco? He convinced me I would be much happier if I just did it right (so wise!). Unfortunately, the program I used to design the first announcements look grainy when I converted it to a JPEG. I redesigned the whole thing and uploaded the file to Costco where they were done in an hour and looked fantastic. Why I didn't think of this before, I will just have to blame it on post-partum something or other.
From this story, it sounds like a spent a lot of time, but it really wasn't too bad. I really enjoy designing things like this. I just wish the rest of my life cooperated with my efforts!