Weddingbee

I’ve known Y since high school. Not only is she the only person I know who can pull off yellow nail polish and a beehive, during the 13 years I’ve known her I’ve always associated her with art. She and bridesmaid E got to make cool paintings and sculptures in art class while I was stuck playing the clarinet in band across the hall. Y eventually went on to pursue her creative side at Cooper Union, and all these years later, she’s still the funky girl from high school who hasn’t changed a bit—except for the fire red, five-inch heeled, patent leather knee-high boots she used to wear senior year, of course. When she offered to design our wedding invites for us, I was ecstatic, but concerned. For one thing, I am so incapable of asking for help that the thought of her spending so much time on something for us stressed me out. Secondly, despite how talented she was, she and I have such different personalities and I wondered if our tastes would clash. Trust me, she assured. I know you and I know your style.

She did more than I could have ever asked for. She created four designs for us, and in the end we chose this one:

Now that we had the final invites, finding a way to print everything was an adventure in itself. Mr. Martini and I spent more money than we would have liked on a printer with the idea that it was a good investment, since everything wedding related would be printed on that printer. Unfortunately, when we decided on using metallic paper instead of normal cardstock, we were told that metallic paper must be printed on with a laser printer and cannot be fed through an inkjet printer, because the ink would not dry properly on the metallic paper. Our original budget for invites was pretty small, and we were already way over that budget after we decided to go with pocketfold invites. After calculating how much we would have to spend on professional printing, our costs were sky high. What to do? We were already super behind on the invites. Would we spend the time making each pocketfold to save money, or would we suck it up and literally pay the price for procrastinating?

Bridesmaid E came to the rescue when she suggested printing the invites from the monster-sized laser printer in her office (I know. We’re soooo bad, but we didn’t use much ink I swear! But tell me we’re not the only culprits?). We were there on December 30 until what had to have been 1 or 2 in the morning, red-eyed, half-wired on Red Bull, and half asleep from exhaustion from the day’s events, since we also had to get ready to leave for a NYE snowboarding trip the very next day. We cut one and created a mock-up to get an idea of what it would look like. I have to say that once I saw it all put together I got a little teary eyed. We were finally going to get a huge part of our wedding completed! The only bad thing was that I wasn’t looking forward to cutting everything with my ghetto paper trimmer, and Bridesmaid E came to the rescue once again when she lent me her super duper heavy duty rotary paper trimmer (which by the way, is the most AMAZING paper cutter EVER).

As for the pocketfolds, I originally wanted these:

Lots of metallic 80 lb cardstock in Quartz from Paper Presentation

When I win the lottery, I will definitely buy myself one of these babies.

Directions, pre-cut.

The mock-up of our invites.

If I had already won the lottery that I am eventually going to win, I would have liked to have added a purple border around the invite and the directions/RSVP cards. But I’m very happy with them!

We really wouldn’t have been able to get this done without the help of Y and E and I can’t thank them enough. E gave me great advice when she assured me, “Don’t be afraid to ask for help. You’d be surprised how many people want to!”

Do you have a fear of asking friends for wedding help? How do you overcome it?