It's time once again to prepare for the Oregon Country Fair (for those who are not familiar, you can read the Country Fair back-story here). This whole process is always interesting, and this year is no exception. The first part is filling out the forms in April. My mom very kindly did this part, and then the rest of us just had to pony up for the fees. The next part was doing the art for new T-shirt designs, and ordering the shirts on which these designs will be printed.
New art is a question we try to consider well before the actual fair, but often it sort of gets left until just a few weeks before the actual event. This year, however, my mom and I were determined not to leave things last minute. We found several acceptable ideas, and then we pared it down to three: a dragon, three goldfish, and a bike. I know, I know, it sounds like a mish-mash, but I have high hopes for each of them turning out well. Using the old-fashioned method of knife and amberlithe, my mom cut color separations for each design. While she was working on that, I started to collect the information to put together a t-shirt order.
Going one item at a time, I used an online catalog and price list. Now this is an interesting challenge because the catalog and the pricelist are separate. The logic for this is that you, the printer, can send a customer to look at the items in the catalog without letting them know what the real wholesale price. They also say that it has to be separate because prices change a lot. These are both ridiculous arguments since this is a COMPUTER program with a user login. Updating the pricelist should take no less time just update the price IN the catalog. Anyway, I digress. After many hours of flipping back and forth, I managed to put together an order of about 200 pieces. I was all set. Now comes the farce.
I called the company to place the order. They told me I was not an authorized buyer on this account (I was using my dad's account with his permission) and hung up. I called my dad since he had not mentioned the need to be a designated buyer. He was not home, so I left him a message and headed out to do some errands. He called me back at 4:57pm. I happened to be sitting in my parked car waiting for my cel phone to charge. He said I should just pretend to be a buyer, and they wouldn't know the difference. I asked for their number as I booted my laptop. I couldn't find a pen, so I had to open the trunk and grab one from there. By the time I found one it was 4:58. I wrote down the number and opened my order on my laptop. I called the company and was very happy to get through. They transferred me to ordering, my call would be monitored..., it rang, and... I got cut off. When I called back, they were closed. Argh! For want of a pen!
My dad finally got the place the order the next day. Now I'm off to Fedex the art to the print shop so my dad can make the screens. I'm going to Oregon this weekend to actually print as many of these shirts as I can. Anything left over will have to be done in the few days before the fair. Just like old times.
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