This is my printer. I love my printer. It's beautiful, and makes wonderful prints when everything is working correctly. But sometimes, I push my printer to do things it doesn't want to do. Sometimes I neglect it longer than I should. Sometimes, it's worked too had for too long. In these situations, things go wrong.

Over the summer, I let the printer sit. I think that combined with my habit of putting things through the printer that it doesn't like (fabric!) caused a major blocked up printer. When I printed my first nozzle check after 6 weeks, it was completely blank.

Not good.

This is a nozzle check from earlier today. It starts out okay, but by the end it's all patchy. Still work to be done here.

There's a couple things to do about a horribly clogged printer. My go-to method is placing a folded paper towel dampened with glass cleaner under the printer head over night.

So I did this a bunch.

This is some of the paper towels I used for cleaning. It's kind of cool to see when some of the colors loosen up. Kind of. It would be fun if ink wasn't so darn expensive.

The next thing to do is run a thousand head cleanings. This takes time, it's a little loud, and because I don't like wasting ink except in the name of art, I don't put it on auto cleaning. Which means I have to babysit the printer. And catch up on my Netflix. And photo editing.

While you watch your link levels slowly lower, you might as well empty your bank account and buy extra cartridges of every color. And a couple new maintenance tanks (the giant white sponge in the print that absorbs all the ink being forced through the printer head during cleaning).