Our biggest mistake

By Sarah

There it was. A burgundy card held together by two curving flaps with “Sarah” and “Tony” punched on opposite ends. An eighth-inch strip of gold paper lined the outside and inside the words were printed on a delicate cream paper with burgundy leaves dotted throughout. The masterpiece was tied together with an elegant gold bow.

It was perfect, my mom and I decided – after a couple glasses of wine – except for one minor detail. We had to make 299 more.

I would have given up on such a lofty project early on, but my mom insisted it would make an impression on our guests (in her defense, it did), and she couldn’t give up the idea that the invitations wouldn’t be as glorious as the one we first produced. So, my dad was put on operations duty, coming up with a jig we could use to carve the paper, figuring out how to glue all the paper so it wouldn’t leave wrinkles and determining what kind of paper worked best. Then he and I dug into cutting, gluing and assembling, which took MONTHS to complete.

All for invitations.

Having been through such a stressful, time-consuming process, I leave you with this advice: Don’t make your own invitations.

Unless they are very simple and still look professional, it is not worth your time, all for the sake of a piece of paper (or several in our case) that people will eventually throw out. Plus, by the time we bought paper, envelopes, cutting boards, printers, stamps and glue, we realized it probably wasn’t that much cheaper (in fact, it could have been more costly) than if we hired someone to print our invites.

In all, the process gave us some laughs, especially on that final night, when I dragged my fiancé over to my parents’ house to prepare the invitations for the mail. He and my dad were in a competition to see if they could get all 300 envelopes printed without messing up, because it meant starting the entire printing process over again, while my mom tied ribbons until her fingers literally bled and I stuffed them into envelopes.

My mom still asks whether all the blood, sweat and tears were worth it for one amazing presentation. In her mind, they were so magnificent that the thought of all the effort it took to get there has vanished. For me, it remains a cloud that mars my view of them. I can’t help thinking about all those hours we spent making them and all the other things I could have been doing. I still tell her: No way!