Sending out the Love...

a.k.a. The Invites are in the Mail!

This was a super exciting morning.  To begin with, it's Friday (which is usually enough for me).  And, we decided yesterday that the invitations should be in the mail today!

They have actually been sitting in a box since Sunday, when I spent the majority of my day finishing them:

(personal pic)

And, while I'm not going to reveal the whole invitation (since no one could have possibly received theirs yet), I am going to share a huge DIY fail...

First, I'd like to say that over half of our invitations were done before I thought to check for this...  it was something that came to me as I was laying in bed one night, reviewing my ridiculous mental to-do list (not to be confused with my actual to-do list, safely kept in Google Documents)...

Can you see the issue here:

(personal pic)

Notice that the first line has my name and then his name?  Notice how the second line has the word husband and then the word bride?  Notice how I became the husband in this sentence and he the bride?

It's subtle.  The FI said he wouldn't have given it a second thought had I not mentioned it.  But, as a bride, as soon as I saw it, I knew those inviations could NOT go out.

So, I re-printed 80+ invitation wordings.  I re-cut 80+ pieces with the words into the correct size.  I tore apart the existing invites (taking care not to rip the paper as I went).  Then, I re-started the process of attaching the actual invitation words to the base and mat.

It was heartbreaking.  Seriously, I had been feeling so close to being done and then this happened.

Of course, looking back, it was nothing.  A couple extra hours of work compared to the total time.  Pshhhh, nothing.

But, the experience leads me to offer these words of advice to other invite DIY-ers:

• Make sure to have several sets of eyes check the invitation wording before it's final.  There is little chance that one person (especially the person who made the invitation) will be able to find all the errors.
• If you are attaching several layers of invitation together, consider using double sided adhesive instead of glue.  Why?  Well, if you realize that one piece is crooked, you will probably be able to pull it off and replace it.  And, in a worse case scenario, if you have to re-do a bunch of the invitations, you might not have to start over from scratch.
• Don't be too critical.  After hours and days of staring at the invitations, it's hard to be subjective.  Every little imperfection becomes magnified.  Remember, most people won't notice those tiny issues and no one but you really knows what they were supposed to look like anyway.