How to - need to make a cheap home printer "wireless"

Hi all,
I have a cheap color printer off in a corner that we hook up the
portable to when we really want something on color (school project,
etc). The print stream is USB connected and it works fine.
The last time I checked, I found that I could not set & save
wireless connection settings in a USB wireless adapter, but that the
PC is actually needed to establish the wireless connection. In other
words, the USB "stick" is just the adapter/transmitter but dumb.
I was hoping someone had figured out a way to make these printers
with USB connections connect wireless without a PC and hopefully
without an expensive access point/external print server. The cheapest
route I can think of now is an old PC with the wireless card with the
PC set to serve print requests. But running that PC on electricity
just for a few pages a week seems too anti-green these days.
I *think* they are just going to have to lug the portable up the
stairs and plug in the USB and dumb the printout.
If you have bought a home budget / small wireless print server
lately I would be interested in knowing the model you picked, if you
can recommnend it.