Wedding Blog

Like many a bee before me, I have hit a few bumps in the road in wedding planning. About a month ago we hit a snag that made me feel seriously over wedding planning. While I obviously haven’t called off our wedding, it has taken me this long to get perspective and realize I should share my blunder with the hive.

Let’s rewind to September 2008. Mr. PT and I started one of the most exciting parts of wedding planning—choosing INVITATIONS!! Like Miss Piglet, I had compiled a ton of inspirational wedding invites; unlike Miss Piglet, I knew that I didn’t have the design savvy or the patience to DIY our invites. So I showed Mr. Peep the invites I liked, unsure of where we’d get our invites made. The good news was that we were on the same page as to what we liked design-wise, and we both knew we wanted eco-friendly invites. The bad news was that Mr. Peep really really wanted letterpress invites. I nearly laughed in his face. Letterpress invites were SO NOT in our budget. Once again, out came our Champagne tastes creeping through on our Bud Light budget (isn’t this trend getting annoying??).

Mr. PT was a bit persistent, so I told him I’d humor him by spending a day looking for an affordable letterpress vendor, and then I’d move on to invites that we could actually afford.

I sent out at least a dozen emails to Etsy vendors and professional designers. Most of the responses were exactly what I expected—WAY over budget. Then I got an email from an Etsy designer who seemed open to helping us design invites, as she was just expanding her invitation business, and she had a great deal with a letterpress printer. It seemed too good to be true.

We traded a bunch of emails. In a few of them, I reconfirmed the prices she was offering. She was even offering eco-friendly invites—Crane Lettra made of cotton—that were totally tree-free!! I finally told Mr. PT that I had done the impossible—I had found some letterpress invites that we could afford!! She even mailed us a beautiful sample. We were sold, and put down a small deposit.

Come January, we were finally ready to design our invites. Again, our Etsy designer was fantastic to work with. In order to avoid a blunder and stay on the same page, I asked her for an invoice before we got too far ahead of ourselves. Her response was that she would get us one soon.

Finally, we had approved a final proof!! We were both super excited.

This is where the blunder came in. She finally sent an invoice, and it was well over double of what we thought the price would be. I was irrational and irate and sent an email (that could have been nicer) confronting her on the discrepancy. There was a huge discrepancy in both the design cost and the printing cost. The good news for me was that I still had all of our emails discussing price, so I forwarded them to her. I’d love to say that that was the end of it, but for a few days, I seriously thought that we’d have to leave our beautifully designed invites on the table and forgo the small deposit. It took almost a dozen emails (most of which were under the watchful and rational eye of Mr. PT), but we finally came to a consensus on the price.

While the invites were being printed, I still felt like the transaction had left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, but last week we received this in the mail:

They are beautiful and we couldn’t be happier.*

BUT I’ll always know that these invites caused us a few days of drama and tears. So here’s my long way of saying to everyone out there that it’s not just enough to confirm the price. Make sure that you have a signed contract before you even begin work. We had waited a few months between our first email and when we started designing the invitations, so the price of printing the invites had increased. Plus, I was unaware of all the design costs. These were the hidden costs that I tried so hard to figure out (her bad), yet I got so wrapped up in designing the invites that I forgot to finalize the costs (my bad).

And, just in case you are nervous that you are going to run into my Etsy designer—I’ve never seen her name mentioned on Weddingbee and I think she learned a lesson on this project, as well.

Anyone else have a bridal blunder that you felt like you could have avoided? What’s your biggest blunder to date?

*I am such a tease- I won’t show them to you until they are in the mail next month!!