Neverending Invitations - Part (i)

The invitations were one of the few wedding things I was really, really looking forward to doing. I'm a complete bookworm and I love all things paper. A stationery shop or a second-hand book shop are my idea of heaven. So having a genuine Doing-Important-Wedding-Things reason to browse through papers and fonts got me quite excited. I almost did a happy dance in the middle of a gorgeous little paper shop I found (and it was almost right outside my work!).

I spent hours and hours looking at scrolling through the mouth-watering letterpress websites and Etsy shops before reality kicked in and I started seriously wondering whether it was worth spending so much on what was really just one small part of the wedding that would not have anywhere as much significance to most guests as it did to me. It would be a lot more sensible to print the invitations at home and save the money for something more important. Like food. Or peonies.

As I don't tend to finish work until 6/7/8pm I knew that it was sensible to not try and take on the whole task of designing them and printing them myself so I found a designer on Etsy who would design them and email me the file for me to print them out at home. Perfect.

Or not. As she was based in an opposite timezone it took weeks of emails to get a super-simple design right. But never mind. It was eventually sorted and I could start printing.

So I got out my stacks of paper, envelopes and ribbon and started printing. Then realised that the text wasn't lining up. A quick email to the designer established that she'd missed out a line and it was fixed and re-sent.

Started printing again a few days later to realise that it was now even wonkier. The paper size in the file wasn't the same as what was in the printer.

At that point I gave up on the designer's file. I copied all the text out again and recreated the whole thing in Word and printed from that. It worked perfectly and I had most of the invitations printed. And then.... then I realised I'd misspelled one. single. word.

That was the point when I channelled my inner two year old and threw the mightiest tantrum -I think it was only the quick thinking of the boy in providing an emergency gin and tonic that stopped me texting our guests to invite them whilst stamping on the ruined invitations. They did look quite pretty strewn across the floor.

I was so tempted to just shove them in an envelope at that point and hope that no-one noticed but I just couldn't do it. So off I went to the paper shop to buy more paper. I eventually got them all printed and then spent the next week ribboning them up.

With the completely useless file from the designer and all the extra paper I think it's ended up costing as much as if I'd had them printed professionally and I'm scared to count the grey hairs I've gained.