When Things Don’t Work Out: Pray

Today was the day I have been looking forward to for a long time. I was going to get a few collages printed on linen. Something I’ve never done before. Three collages for Nature Girl’s new bedroom (African décor) and two for a friend’s kitchen and sewing room. (Think I’ve mentioned this before, sorry.)

If there is one thing that I love to do, it is to go to a new company or store with an errand.

I am not a shopper. I hate shopping. And I definitely do not “do” window-shopping or cost comparison, or bargain shopping in any form or manner. Admittedly, a fault of mine.

Yet, if I have to buy some new tool for my toolbox, or ask a tradesman some information about the defective stove thermostat, or, as it was today, go to a large printing company to get stuff printed, then I happily skip off on the wonderful adventure. I just love discovering people who know what they are doing, who have a field of expertise totally different them my own. The challenge is to ask the right questions and get them talking. It’s like taking a skinny-dipping into new territory.

Today’s romp to the printers wouldn’t have been too bad, the fellow was very amicable and forthcoming, if it wasn’t for the fact that all of the five collages had this mysterious five centimetres faded strip at the top of the collage. He told me it was my computer’s fault; there must have been a problem with the conversion of the Photoshop file into pdf. Well, the faded strip did not change with the bmp file and even the psd file. So, I’m thinking maybe it doesn’t have to do with my computer, but with the printer, you get my gist?

In the end, we just could not go on and so I decided to see about framing the collages with five centimetres cut off the top. Not the best of solutions, but I cannot possibly spend more on getting them printed again. The colours are good. The results, except for that annoying strip, are fine.

Then I went off to the art gallery, to get the linen stretched onto frames; like a painting canvas. Unfortunately, the woman at the gallery was not the owner, a very lively and competent person, who I talked to a few days ago, but her second cousin or an old friend just out of rehab. Whoever the woman was, she had no, and I mean NO, practical aptitude whatsoever.

Each collage is printed so that there is two centimetres on each side to fold over the sides of the frame. I do not want the sides of the frames to be white because I plan to hang them as canvases. This woman could not grasp the concept that she just has to measure the full width and height of the collage and subtract four centimetres from each length to get the width and height of the frame for each collage. It was a painful process of measuring each collage, the woman giving me totally wrong measurements, my correcting her politely (e.g. “No, it is not 47 cm wide, the end of the collage is 43 cm, it is your thumb that is at 47 cm (I kid you not)), my drawing up five sketches with the necessary width and height of each collage. Arrrgh, painful, painful.

In the end I politely asked her to get her colleague to call me tomorrow with a cost estimate. I am praying that with the sketches, the owner of the shop and I can work things out over the telephone. There’s a bit of risk of course, but, at this point in the adventure, I’ve reached the point of no return.