Invitation cards

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am definitely someone who does not stand on ceremony. I pride myself on being honest, straightforward, and direct, for better or for worse. I speak my mind whenever I can, and I usually frown on formality. So when I was in a position of having to plan my own wedding, things were pretty difficult for me.

My original plan had been to use do it yourself wedding invitations. I had figured that I could make my own quirky, handmade wedding party invitations with a personalized message for each person. I thought it was a pretty good idea, and to my surprise, so did the relatives I talked to.

My mother was all for it, as was my mother-in-law. I didn't realize how much work I was getting myself into, however. Planning out, executing, and customizing a couple hundred wedding invitations was just something that was beyond my means to do. I didn't want to spend that amount of money on wedding cards.

I simply didn't know how to go about it. I knew that it was important to my relatives – more important than it was to me in fact. The wedding invitations, the wedding floral arrangements – everything had to look just right. The problem was, I had no idea how to plan things out.

Nonetheless, I wanted to be involved in planning them out and designing them. I looked at several wedding invitations samples on the Internet to get some clue. Most of them were not very good. I think people are way too sentimental with their invitations for a wedding in general.

Finally, I did the sensible thing that I should have done all along. I went to a wedding invitation printer. I was trying too hard to be unconventional, when I could have saved a lot of time going conventional and moved on to something that I cared about.

They use fancy, embossed printing, tacky gold foil – the works. I didn't want my wedding invites to look like that, but I didn't want them to look cheap and shabby either. I wanted down to earth, attractive, but simple wedding invitations.

I picked out some tasteful wedding invitations, sent them out, and was done with it. It is really much easier than I had been making it. I did learn something from all of this, however. I learned that I did care about matters of taste and wedding etiquette.