Weddingbee Blog

Remember the announcements I was going to send a few weeks after the wedding? Yeah… well… It was more like 7 weeks. I have an excuse for 4 of the weeks: I was waiting for pro-photos. But the other three weeks? I was just procrastinating.

Anyway, I finally got around to it. Since I’m suffering from the post-wedding lethargy (which makes us put everything wedding-related on the back burner and focus on stuff we’ve neglected during the wedding planning process), I kind of dumped all of my fabulous DIY ideas and instead had VistaPrint do it.

Our announcements cost $27.44 shipped, for 50 of them with standard envelopes. According to my ’order details’, I saved $20.01 with coupon codes and specials they were running. It was a pretty good deal (though I really only needed about 20 and now I have tons of leftovers!!). But as is often the case, there’s a reason VistaPrint is so cheap.

First off, I “splurged” and paid the extra $3 to have them print it on the fancy Linen paper. Now maybe it’s just me, but I really didn’t think the Linen finish was very good. The paper was not very thick (Michaels cardstock is thicker than that), and check this out: it shows lots of dust.

However, the texture on the paper was really nice, and the linen finish did hide potential fingerprints from showing.

But here’s the worst thing. I lined everything up online and made sure it was all facing the appropriate directions. It even showed me that the design was aligned properly on their site. From seeing this:

I did not quite expect this:

Yes, the picture was upside-down from the wording. What you’re seeing there is exactly what the recipients saw when the flipped the announcement over: upside-down photo versus writing.

I had a brief moment of, “Dammit, now I have to complain/re-order,” and then just decided to send them out as is. Oh well. Like I said, you get what you pay for. And I was over this project before I even started it. (Upside-down? Who cares? Haha! At least the spelling is all correct!)

Have you had imperfect wedding elements that you’ve just decided to allow people to experience “as-is”?