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The Great Wedding Invitation Disaster of 2009

And so continues Our DIY Wedding series!  Click here to start at the beginning.  Click here to view the entire series!

The Great Wedding Invitation Disaster of 2009 & How You Can Learn From My Mistakes.  Brought to you by The Thinking Closet.

Today I have for you all a cautionary tale of a DIY project gone terribly terribly wrong.  This tale is set in spring of 2009, just a few month before our wedding on the seashore.  I give to you my inner monologue:

“Invitations: they can’t be that difficult to do yourself.  Plenty of budget-savvy brides design and print their own invitations without a hitch.  I’m crafty.  I enjoy a little graphic design and double-sided tape now and then.  This’ll be eeeeeasy, right?”

Ha!  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  But hindsight is twenty-twenty, and without DIY disasters like these, life would be rather dull now, wouldn’t it?  And my blog would be a snooze-fest.  So, hooray for mishaps!

My DIY Wedding Invitations

Fonts

First I’ll share a breakdown of how I designed my invitations and the supplies I used…then, we’ll get to why things went south.

Once I decided that I wanted to design my invitations myself, I knew Microsoft Word just wasn’t going to cut it, so I downloaded a free 30 day trial of Adobe InDesign, which proved to be fairly user-friendly.  I used the program to design our invitations, reply cards, and directions cards.  I’m a bit of a font fanatic, so it was all I could do to limit my fonts to only three.  (If you’re looking for downloads of these fonts, here ya go: Bickham Script Two | Birmingham | Modern No. 20.)

I also have to give props to Jessica Bishop of The Budget Savvy Bride; her blog was an immense help to me when planning my wedding, and I gleaned a lot of inspiration from her D.I.Y. Wedding Invitations.  You check ’em out here.

Below is an itemized list of the supplies I purchased for my invitations, as well as the cost of printing.  The prices reflect what I paid in spring of 2009, not their current price.  Amazon links are affiliate links, which means if you click through and make a purchase, you’ll be supporting The Thinking Closet for which I will be very grateful.

Total: $400, which breaks down to $2/invitation (including postage)

My DIY Wedding Invitations

My DIY Wedding Invitations

My DIY Wedding Invitations

 

Compass stamp.

I’m sure that by now you’re thinking to yourself, “Wait a minute.  I thought this was a cautionary tale!  These invites don’t look half bad!”  Hold your horses, Hannah, because the plot is about to thicken.

Smudge not, lest ye be judged!

What I did not know (until it was too late) was that the white linen cardstock I purchased did not fancy the ink from the printers at Kinkos; in fact, they got along about as well as oil and water.  So, you can imagine my horror when I gently brushed my finger across the freshly printed text of our invitations and watched my first, middle, and last names smear into one gibberish mouthful!  A few more strokes of the finger and the words were indiscernible.

Even on cards I barely touched, I could zero in on smudged text.  This was officially a DIY disaster.

Evidence of smudges!

The Grieving Process

Krylon Preserve It Paper Protectant

At that point, I went through all of the stages of grief:

  • denial: “It’s not that bad.  People don’t really handle invitations that much anyway…”
  • anger: “Kinkos!  Why did you betray me?!”
  • bargaining: “Maybe if we cut the cake from the budget, we can get the invitations reprinted…”
  • depression: “Pass me the cookie dough.”
  • acceptance: “Some of the invitations will be smudged.  They will be imperfect.  That would be that.  And the people who love Mark and me will not judge us for our smudges!”

And just as I had come to a place of peace about my smudgy invitations, my resourceful father swooped in and saved the day.  He had found in his internet searching a magical serum called Krylon Preserve It Paper Protectant, and it indeed proved to be our saving grace!  It sets text onto the page, so we were able to prevent any further smudging.  While Mark was in town, he took on the task of spraying 200 invitations, 200 directions cards, and 200 reply cards.  What a guy!

Laying out the invitations to be sprayed!

My DIY reply cards.

Letting Krylon Preserve It work its magic on my DIY wedding invitations.

Direction cards.

And just when things were looking up…

Now, I just have to share this part, because as awful as it was at the time, it makes it a great story now.  Mark and I had just sprayed some invitations one evening and left them on the front porch to dry for twenty minutes.  Twenty minutes: that’s all.  Well, in those twenty little minutes, a storm decided to pick up and blow those invitations every which way on the front porch.  When we came out and saw the rain-drizzled mess, I almost had a breakdown.

I looked at Mark, and he must have known the floodgates were about to open because he said, “Quick!  Bring everything inside first, and then we are going to have a good, long cry about it because this is just too much.”  Seriously, were we on Candid Camera?

When it came time for our cry-fest, I couldn’t help but burst into laughter at his fake crying.  It was truly just what I needed to help me through it.  Mark has always been really good for me in that way—reminding me not to take life too seriously—to laugh and hug often.  It works wonders.  Even in the most disastrous of situations!

The Great Wedding Invitation Disaster of 2009 & How You Can Learn From My Mistakes.  Brought to you by The Thinking Closet.

Lessons learned

In retrospect, here were two important things that I should have done differently:

  1. I should have done a test-run at Kinkos before having them print the entire job.
  2. Even after they printed the entire job, when the smudge-fest happened, I should have brought the invitations back to Kinkos and asked for a re-print on different paper.  They might have said no, but I have a hunch they would have said yes and saved us all the headache of having to spray every.  single.  invitation.  reply card.  and direction card.  Sheesh!

So, to all the brides-to-be in the house and event planners, be sure to leave room in your timeline for a test-run or reprints.  If only I had started our wedding invitation process a few weeks earlier, then I wouldn’t have felt so down to the wire and stressed out about our time frame.  While it has taken me 30 years to learn this lesson, I’m finally starting to understand that margin is your friend.

NEW VIDEO!

Update one year later….

In honor of our 6th wedding anniversary, I actually dedicated two live Periscope broadcasts to chatting through 10 of the lessons I learned while planning my own wedding.  In it, I retell the story of this tragedy, which you can jump to by clicking HERE.  Or start from the beginning, and hear all 10 lessons by watching the video replay below!

Our Save the Date!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t share a more successful DIY, which were our save-the-dates, designed by Mark himself!  Here’s it is:

Creative Save the Date idea!

Essentially, this is a picture of a picture of a picture!  Mind blowing, I know!  What I loved about these were their simplicity.  There were no words on the back…just this photo inside an envelope that read “save the date.”  #lessismore

Wrap-Up!

Thanks for following along in today’s saga!  Perhaps you had a DIY disaster of your own when preparing for your wedding or an important event?  Please tell me I’m not the only one with cautionary tales like these….

Be sure to check out the next installment in Our DIY Wedding series, Wedding Dress Tips: The Cardinal Rule I Broke & Why It Was Worth It.

{Linking up here.}

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43 Comments

  1. Thank you so much for sharing this. I’ve had a wedding invitation mini-disaster myself this week. I can only recognize it is a MINI-disaster now, after reading your post. My invitations look pretty yucky. I still have to decide whether to use them. They were made by a friend who had good intentions when she insisted on making them and dismissed my concerns about the project.

    1. Oh no, Ingrid! I’m sorry to hear you’ve suffered your own wedding invitation disaster…but of 2018 this time! I hope you feel a peace about whatever decision you make. And remember that no one will remember the invites a year from now. As long as they know the who, where, and when, they’ve got everything they need to get to a wedding for the record books! Congrats to you and your mate. XO

  2. I didn’t even think that once my reply envelopes were in the larger envelope that they would still smudge (after all, they’d had a little time to try.. how long could it take for 3 little lines??) Well, I got a couple back in the mail smudged, I told myself it wasn’t that bad and it happened on the way back (dirt, not ink). Well I just got one hand-delivered and it was worse than the others! 🙁 Oh well! You would think since I’m a designer with a little experience, I would have thought of using a fixative when I saw the tiniest bit of smudging during the process, but I never thought it could be that bad. Maybe on my next wedding, I’ll do it right. 😀 lol

  3. I just made my invitations myself from scratch- including die-cutting each piece (twice, due to backing) with a hand crank, and gluing together to backing… wording, decorating, designing, font downloading, formatting, printing……. many prototypes… took FOREVER because my fiancé lives across the country so no help, and a busy job + travel to see fiancé. Then I had an elbow dislocation while bouldering, and had to back off for 2.5 months. But I just finished them after 100+ man hours, over 9 months.

  4. Oh the infamous wedding invitation disaster…I remember it well! Actually, I more remember the seemingly never-ending strings I tied round them (and used a hot glue gun, I think?)! I’ll add to the chorus that you and Mark handled things perh-ity well, if I do say so myself. I don’t think I ever knew about Mark’s exaggerated fake crying to put things into perspective! A good man, he is. That’s one of my favorite things about you two, you easily laugh together. You’ve got a joyful marriage! And I must add, you and I are looking perh-ity HAWT in that photo of us working on invites. 🙂

    1. Bah ha ha. I know, we were most definitely crazed and caffeinated in that photo…and on our 100th string-tying. Ya know, we didn’t use hot glue, but I think we had a system where one person would place their finger to hold the first tie tight, while the second person tied the bow…or so my faulty memory recollects. I really have a mental block on a lot of these details, though…clearly, it was a stressful time, but by God’s grace we made it through! Exaggerated fake crying and all! (Yes, he is a good man, that one…in the garage right now at 11pm, working on our headboard, bless his heart.)

      And I loved your spelling of HAWT. It brings on a whole different meaning in my mind compared to HOT! Ha ha.

  5. I remember being so impressed with how well you and Mark handled the whole situation! And what a great story in retrospect.

    How sweet that @Midsommarflicka noticed your middle names, particularly Linnea! I enjoyed your interchange with her!

    1. Thanks, Mom. I’m sure your prayers and encouragement were instrumental in helping us keep our cool!

      And I’m glad you saw my little convo with Midsommarflicka. Love my international bloggy friends, especially ones with connections to Sweden!

  6. I can’t believe I’m only reading this now – that’s how behind I am! Let me tell you, though, I love the story and I love your attitude (and Mark’s) throughout the entire thing. I opted for setting up a website and sending out Save the Date cards with the site info on them for people. Can I just say THE WORLD IS NOT READY FOR WEDDING WEBSITES?!?!?! Oh my gosh… disaster. People had no idea what was happening and kept asking when invitations would be mailed out. Some things should just not be changed… Lesson learned! You did a beautiful job both on the Save the Dates and the invites though, so as far as I’m concerned it was a craft/DIY win!!!!!

    1. I love that you went “green” with your wedding invitations, Thalita. Way to be eco-conscious. I did that with reply cards (used our wedding website), but I can see how an entire invitation online might cause an uproar. As far as we think we’ve advanced as a society, we’re still resistant to change, I think. Prime example: my very tech-savvy Dad is still on aol email. ‘Nuff said.

      And thanks for your encouraging words! We prevailed in the end…a little smudgy, but we prevailed! 😉

  7. You’re in a better place now, and you’ve got a great story to share 🙂 Question though – when you printed, did you specify for them to print in their laser printers? Laser burns the powder in, whereas the inkjets are wet. Just curious. Didn’t know you got married in Jersey – yeah!

    1. Ya know, I’m 90% sure we did laser printing. But I remember that there was just something about that paper I ordered that almost resisted the ink. Anyway, if I could go back and do it all over again, I would have done a million things differently, but hindsight is always 20/20, right? And as you said, it’s a great story now!

      And yes, Jersey is near and dear to my heart. We vacationed in Ocean Grove throughout my childhood…so getting married right near the Grove was so special for us!

    1. Ha ha. I really did go through all of those feelings…and probably a hundred more. It was such a hectic time of life, I really was about at my breaking point with this whole invitation disaster. Laughter helped get us through it, though!

  8. I love your little series…
    And your invitations have a great design! It all looks awesome!

    Hearing your story now really makes it a fun story, but I can imagine (or not?) how heartbreaking it must have been in the first moment! I would have wanted to do all again from beginning!

    (And: I love love love your second name! A Danish girl I know is also called Linnea. Such a beautiful name! Do you know where it comes from and what it means?)

    Love, Midsommarflicka

    1. Thanks, Midsommarflicka! My middle names are in honor of each of my grandmother. Linnea is my Mor Mor’s middle name, too! (Yes, I call her Mor Mor, Swedish for Mother’s Mother.) And Linnea is Swedish in origin, named for a twinflower. So neat that you know a Danish Linnea! I’ve only ever met one American girl named Linnea.

      And yes, though it was heartbreaking at the time, even then, I remember thinking, “At least this will make a good story one day.” 🙂

      1. That’s so sweet to have middle names in honor of family members. I would love to have a middle name, but they’re not common here, or at least not common for my family… I thought that Linnea is Swedish, but the only thing I could ever think about in correlation with the name was Carl von Linné. So actually not too far away from the meaning, as I know now after looking up the flower!

        …and you were right. It made a good story! A wedding without any troubles would maybe be too boring any way 😉

        1. You could choose your own middle name! Why not? Maybe Midsommarflicka could be like your middle name…. And I’m impressed you drew the connection between Linnea and Carl von Linné! I do believe he appears in the Wikipedia article I read.

          Yes, these “hiccups” in life are just salt in the soup: they add flavor!

          1. Haha, I had a children’s book where the girl was named Linnea and she planted flowers… So there was probably also Carl von Linné mentioned. Or maybe my mum told me about him then?! But there is definitely no need to be impressed. It was just a little memory somewhere in my mind from long ago…

          2. I had that very same children’s book, too! In fact, I think I still have it at my parents’ house in New York. Wow! What a small world.

  9. Lauren, What a great story! It sounds like something that could have easily happened to me. But your father saved the day! This story could save lots of DIY brides to be lots of grief! Stories and mishaps make life interesting.

    1. Yes, Dad to the rescue (and it wasn’t the first or the last time either)! I remember being skeptical when I picked up that Krylon spray bottle at a hardware store in NYC on my way home from grad school…but then, when we tested it and found that the ink no longer smeared, I think I heaved the hugest sigh of relief ever heaved!

      Yes, I do hope it saves some brides-to-be some unnecessary headache! That would help redeem this story. Ha ha.

      Looking forward to catching up on my Delightful Eclectic Abode reading soon! Happy Labor Day weekend, friend.

  10. This is too funny (after the fact, definitely not during)! I actually made my wedding invitations with the help of another teacher in her classroom one day after school. They’re on my blog if you want to check them out. While I’m glad they were easy to make, I don’t have nearly as great a story as you do.

  11. Thank you for sharing your disaster. I’m engaged and thinking of DIYing a lot of things and this is definitely one of them. I’ll remember to allow time and check the smudges. 🙂

  12. Great story and I “felt your pain” but your Mark is good to remind people not to take life too seriously. (easy to say!) As for the dress I vote for samples and seconds wedding shops and wedding dresses are a bit like choosing a groom. You just “know” when the choice is right! 🙂

  13. Oh dear!!! I’m so glad that your invitations, directions, and reply cards didn’t end up scattered all over the neighborhood!! I guess that’s the silver lining?
    I didn’t make my own invitations, but I made my own direction and accommodation cards. I didn’t have any mishaps, but it was still sort of a hellacious process. I designed them in Microsoft Publisher. Because I was awesome like that. I matched the fonts as best I could. And I cut them out by hand. Ugh. I’ll end up with carpal tunnel for sure!

  14. You are SO entertaining!

    I see the infamous Mason jars that are no longer with you. 🙁

    And I LOVE Marks picture “save-the-date”. I wish when we were traveling so much that digital cameras were invented and I could have kept a log of our travels. That is such a cool idea! That one definitely gets entered in the Best Of list. Let’s see, number . . . .

  15. Lauren~ loved hearing all of these details again. It’s so wonderful how you handled it together, you passed the ‘stress-test’ early on! Humor saves the day once again!

  16. Lauren, what a great story….I think that these mishaps before you get married are actually a sign that your marriage will last forever….because you learn to laugh at yourself, find the humor in the moment, and keep grounded! Mark is a keeper….love his save the date announcements! 😉

  17. Front porch, storm… yep, I would’ve been a puddle for sure. Isn’t funny how the heart attack inducing moments end up as some of our best memories? Beautiful invitations though. Makes me wish I’d made mine.

  18. Oh my goodness. I can’t even imaging- At some point I would have called it quits and emailed everyone instead! Also- in high school, my art teacher had us spray hair spray on all of our chalk paintings and the chalk stopped smearing- wonder if this is the same?

  19. Hooray for Krylon! I love that brand and all their products (I really should try to partner up with them!). This sounds like a great memory of a wedding mishap solved. Can you imagine having a wedding where NOTHING goes wrong? Bo-ring! Thanks for sharing. I laughed, I cried, I wondered, I stressed for you. Despite all the issues they look beautiful!

  20. The beauty of this story is that you passed the test as a couple. Despite the disasters, you kept it together and solved the problem together. The invitations were not to celebrate a wedding, but to celebrate two lives and their life-long union. Well done, Lauren.

    And for the record, the same things have happened to me. Long story short, I printed the wrong street name for a 60th birthday party. The mistake wasn’t noticed until after all of the guests had received the invitations. The kicker, my invite was proofread and approved by the host and hostess of the party (my dear brother-in-law and sister-in-law). In addition, I had been mailing items to them with the wrong street address for years – and the item were received by them without problem. As for the guests, the wrong street name (I added one word that was not part of their street) did exist about 50 miles away. I can laugh now, but it was a cry fest for sure.

    1. “The beauty of this story is that you passed the test as a couple. Despite the disasters, you kept it together and solved the problem together. The invitations were not to celebrate a wedding, but to celebrate two lives and their life-long union. Well done, Lauren.”

      Those were my thoughts exactly. I COMPLETELY agree.

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