Wedding Blog

I want to start by saying that I still absolutely adore ourinvitations. They turned out just the way I had hoped, and the response from our guests over them has been better than I could have imagined. With that being said however, hindsight is always 20/20. I started looking at invites before I had even found Weddingbee, or the endless supply of wedding blogs and their invite inspiration. I didn’t know what Etsy was, and had only browsed on The Knot a few times before giving up hope and thinking I would need to look at and feel things before ordering. Even after discovering all these things, I still went ahead with my final order. I wanted Mama Cloud to be involved in the process and sitting in a store doing it made it possible. It actually wasn’t until Miss Gloss posted about her gorgeous DIY invites that I started to have second thoughts. Up until those bad boys went into the mail and I received such great feedback, I borderline hated them (talk about needing reassurance from others). So what would I have done a bit differently if I could go back?

I would have at least considered going the DIY or partial DIY route
I’m making all of the other paper products for the wedding and I own a Gocco, so why didn’t I even entertain this idea? I don’t know; honestly it really never seemed like an option, mostly because I was so set on letterpress. But if I had done my homework I would have known that I could have tried to find an Etsy seller to press my own design (and would have saved a small fortune). I also might have found out sooner that the incredibly amazing art school here in Richmond also has an incredibly amazing letterpress studio in it and sometimes students can be commissioned to print things (which would have also saved some moolah). Time is normally a factor in DIY of course, but for real, I was still a year and a half out. I had nothing but time.

I would have shopped around for better prices
I found the suite I wanted at one store and ordered directly from them. I never thought to look and see if I could find the same thing online cheaper, or even at a different stationery store. These things were not cheap, and I have a LOT of regret about that. Every time I’m trying to cut a few pennies now makes me kick myself for the carelessness I had when spending on the invites.

Getting feedback from previous brides before picking a calligrapher
Even knowing all of my options, I went ahead with a local calligrapher anyway. I had a bad feeling about the situation after our first meeting, but brushed it off as being nervous about handing over my invites to a stranger. She was late for our meeting and didn’t seem concerned when I expressed that I was trying to save some money. We agreed on a certain style with a small extra fee to have everything centered, including zip codes on the bottom line. I won’t go into details, but I work in customer service as a profession, so I might have high standards of what I expect But I ended up becoming very disappointed, very quickly. When I got them back, the quality was not what we had discussed, and only a few invitations had the zip code placed and centered correctly. Not a huge deal in the large scheme of things, but I didn’t notice this until after I had paid her (including the extra 25 cents per envelope for those stupid zip codes). I know they aren’t terrible; some days I almost even like them. But when I started asking around, other brides had similar experiences. If I had dug deeper in the beginning, I would have known the hassle of sending them off would have beat the hassle I dealt with.

I hate the post office
I’m not sure what could have been done differently, but I’m still upset about the whole thing. We knew the envelopes would be more expensive to mail then normal, but after having them weighed multiple times at multiple post offices, we ended up with a different price every single time. Not a few cents different, but anywhere from .92 to 1.98! That’s a big margin of error when you’re mailing 128 of them!! Finally, we got consistent responses of .96 and decided to go with two cake stamps to total 1.22 each. But again, when Mama and Daddy Cloud went to hand cancel them, the guy told them a different price. Daddy Cloud made the executive decision to throw one extra ring stamp on each and call it a day. I don’t even want to know what the REAL price was anymore, and how much money we wasted being safe.

So there they it is, my little list of “coulda-woulda-shoulda”. Nothing enough to keep me awake at night, but still enough to irk me in the back of my mind.

Anyone else have things they would have changed or done differently even after the invites went out?