Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The best laid plans of those who sew

Continuing with my plan to complete the Dancing With the Stars quilt (Carol Doak's Paper Pieced), I decided today to print out the foundation papers for the next month's patterns.  As an aside, let me point out that I live in Florida where it's very HUMID.  Humidity can affect paper.
I put some Carol Doak special paper-piecing-paper into the printer, set the patterns to print, and a few minutes later SOME of the patterns printed out.  But not all of them.
I checked the paper tray, plenty of paper.
I checked as many connections as I could, no problems that I could see.  Hubby and I worked together for about a half hour to figure out what was going on.  We kept getting the message, "Pick Driver Stalled."  Stumped I went to trouble-shooting.
I first started printing it was about 12:30 -- right after lunch --
At about 2:09 I gave up and put a call in to Hewlett Packard.  I was already very frustrated.
The HP person assured me we could either get this done together or they'd send me a new printer, BUT what would I do while I waited for that printer to arrive?
So we slogged through all the various methods to check what was wrong.
We cleaned the feed rollers.
We re-set the printer to its factory settings.
She walked me through about 15 different procedures (most of which I had tried with their online troubleshooting page).
I could tell she was as worried as I was.  After about an hour and a half into this, she said that she was going to have to ask a mechanical technician to get on the line.  I sat there waiting.  We had, together, practically taken the printer apart.  But there was one thing we hadn't done.  So I did it.
I tipped the printer upside down.
Whoa!  There underneath the printer were three sheets of Carol Doak's special paper piecing foundation paper that had crumpled, curled under the paper tray, and were sort of crammed into the space between the printer tray and the main part of the printer.  Nothing we had done would have revealed this because it was UNDERNEATH the printer.  I pulled out the offending sheets, and when the person came back on the line, we did a reset and VOILA! The printer is printing again.
That was just before 4 PM. 
So the best  laid plans of those who sew were sabotaged by a printer. A total of 3 1/2 hours wasted on technology-messing-up.
However, once it was fixed, I was able to print out the 16 sets of foundation pages needed, and I can once again can prepare to sew.
Phew!

1 comment:

  1. Hey Terry,

    It's Nanette from Stashbusters and QT, Jodi had sent you a message asking if you wanted to come to the retreat this year, but we hadn't heard from you, not sure if you got the message. I know it is last minute, but if you are interested, I don't have a roommate as Pat had to back out for her eye procedure. Let me know if you are interested as I have to let Lake Yale know our head count.

    ReplyDelete