Making do with a black and white printer

Today I wished I had a color printer. The real issue was a break down in official routine, but a color printer would have solved the problem. When the kids come home from school they're supposed to bring their backpacks in to the kitchen, empty them, go over their agendas for assignments for the next day and put everything away. Steven left his backpack in the van yesterday, which I didn't notice until I was packing lunches this morning, so his agenda didn't get reviewed after school yesterday like it should have. I found out 15 minutes before the carpool arrived that Steven was supposed to bring a photograph of himself or his family or his dad for a Father's Day craft at school today. Now that we've gone digital with our pictures I only get photos printed for specific projects, so we didn't have any photos laying around that he could just take. If we had a color printer that wouldn't have been a problem, I could have just printed out a nice color photo for him in much less than 15 minutes. He had to take a b&w print on regular printer paper.

Most of the time I don't mind having only a b&w printer. I certainly don't mind it when I look at the price of color ink refills. I even feel like working with this limitation has increased my creativity from time to time, like when I made the last day of school t-shirts with my little girls. I printed out bubble letters and line drawings onto the iron on transfer sheets and then the girls each colored in the letters and pictures with permanent markers right on to the transfer sheet. The hand colored letters and images ironed on just as well as the black and white computer generated outlines, and the girls loved helping with the project!

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We did an advance photo shoot because I'll be at work on their last morning of school, and I'm not putting 'take photos' on a honey-do list for Ken for that morning.

Rainbow colors, of course!

Chloe's kindergarten teacher is going to love this, but she's going to be sad that her daughters are older and she can't copy the idea for her own family.

Our school goes from kindergarten to grade 9, so Chloe is the class of 2016 for grade 9 grad. She colored the transfer for this arm in orange, her current favorite color.

I copied the school logo off the school website. It's so cute, but now I'm concerned because I think it might be copyrighted by the school. I thought of that after we were done.

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Some things just have to be printed in color, and a personalized Guess Who! game is one of those things. I got double inspiration to do this project by a friend of an imaginary friend and from instructables. I just lost my 1st counsellor in YW's, Merrilee, to a new calling - she's the new primary president (I have 3 primary age children and she's great, so I really can't complain) - anyhow, I wanted to make something for her from all the YW she's served for so long, and this personalized game was just the thing. It looked like the FOaIF made her game by using wallet sized school pictures, which I didn't have of all the YW, and the instructables tutorial used photoshop skills I don't possess, so I came up with my own method.

First in my photo editing program (google's Picasa) I cropped down pictures of each YW to head and shoulders shots. I used pictures from past YW activities, and I'm sure Merrilee will recognize which event each picture is from despite the aggressive cropping. Then I pasted all the pictures into columns in Microsoft word - that way I could type out each girl's name under each picture. Then Jaclyn helped me make 3 copies of the document with 3 different background colors. In case you don't have any more Microsoft word knowledge than I do and you don't have a junior high student at your disposal I'll explain that step. Click format in the bar at the top of the page, and then scroll down to background and choose a color. I just eyeballed the color that I thought would match the game cards, and it worked out great. A white background would not have turned out nearly as well.

In these situations I email my documents to Staples and have them print my document for me. Even if I had a color printer I would have sent these pages in. Just think how much color ink it uses up to saturate 3 whole pages.

Because the photos were printed in straight columns my rotary cutter trimmed the game pictures down in a jiffy. Then I just had to glue stick my pictures over the game pictures, assemble, and I was done. It's so cute I almost want to keep it. I highly recommend this project, but honestly, I wouldn't put this much work into a gift for one of my kid's friends.

One more Staples-assisted project this week:

Below are my Father's Day cards for both Grandpas this year. I got doubly introduced to this idea, too. I saw the Tabblo Photo Cube on How About Orange and on Goody, who also saw it on How About Orange - both are on my sidebar. I'm giving the photo cubes in big envelopes, unassembled. I'm not really confident either of them will put their cubes together, but that's okay.

The one for my dad I made from pictures of us at the Alberta Birds of Prey field trip we went on with my parents last weekend.

The card for Ken's dad I made with pictures of us at Ken's parents' ranch.

Edit/Disclaimer: Ken just phoned to tell me that his parents will be back from the ranch before Father's Day after all, which means they'll return to internet access before we get to give his dad the card, which means he may see it before he gets it. Sorry if my blog ruins the surprise!

(My own dad doesn't read my blog much if at all, and even if he does see his card early that's alright with me because I was late mailing it, and there's no way the real card will arrive by Sunday)