An Update on the 2026 Useful Calendar and LoLa
My cat trying to figure out what’s going on inside my old printer in 2011
There must be some invisible force afflicting printers around here lately—first it was my friendly community printer, Smart Set, where my 2026 Year of the Horse calendar was waiting to be converted from a PDF into a tangible analog thing on paper. In the middle of last week, my helpful contact there informed me that their printer was down and they were awaiting the technicians who could fix it.
But soon they were up and running again and printing as beautifully as ever, and I just picked up my calendars today, in time for this weekend’s LoLa Art Crawl. Yay!
But in the meantime, as I’m at home printing my various zines, including a zine/booklet version of the calendar, I get a low toner warning for magenta—“prepare cartridge” it says. Normally, when I first see that message, I have at least a week before it runs out. So I calmly order another and decline to pay extra for faster shipping.
It ran out the next day!
One of my zines that uses almost no color
So I figure I’ll just focus on assembling the things I had already printed—doing the cutting, folding, and stitching—and printing a few things that use little or no red; I also needed to put items in sleeves and prepare how I will display them and whatnot.
Then the toner is delivered two days earlier than expected. Yay! I get right to work printing one of my more colorful little zines, Mary’s Secret Letters. I print a batch of six and sit down to assemble them. But what’s this? Am I wearing the wrong glasses? This text is blurry!
The printer is a Canon ImageClass color laser printer that printed everything beautifully for about 10 years. But now it’s 13 years old, and I had been noticing that the print quality was declining, and figured I would need to replace it eventually.
It’s the main reason I started having the folks at Smart Set print my calendars (also, it saves me from a lot of standing at the paper cutter fussily cutting the cards, and from other repetitive tasks that eat up time that could be used in more creative endeavors).
Canon no longer supports this model of printer, which means no more software upgrades, which means every time I update my computer’s OS, and every time my Adobe design software updates, the printer gets a little worse.
So I guess it just reached a tipping point.
My new version of the ImageClass printer will be delivered next week, and I’m looking forward to getting it set up and running.
Fortunately, I do have a good variety and quantity of items for LoLa this weekend, which is certainly the most important thing to me right now.
If you’re in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, do stop by. I’ll be at site 50, the Toolbox Collective, with 10 other artists. There are even hands-on guided activities with artists throughout the day on Saturday, and a few self-directed ones on Sunday. It’ll be fun!
