D-I-Whhhhyyy!?!

We're trying to do this wedding on the cheap. So far, we've been pretty successful. Until...

INVITATIONS.
(bumbumbum!!!)

Also know as: the bane of my existence.

I thought I'd be all clever and design something in Pages, get the half sheets of card stock (with envelopes!!) from Target, print at home and be done for $30 (plus postage, but whatever).

And it kind of worked. I do love our invitation design. The manfriend is a designer after all - I think we came up with something pretty and classy and just a touch whimsical.

But I might throw our printer out the window.

It had such issue with the card stock. It would not format correctly. We could not figure out how the card stock should lie in the tray for it to print properly. Finally, we were gently placing one sheet at a time in the printer and still had - maybe - a 30% success rate. Our next attempt was Kinko's: they won't print on anything smaller than a full sheet of paper AND they'll charge $1.49 PER CUT. Are you serious?? Yes, we could cut them ourselves - but c'mon. I'm not paying an extra $1.49 per sheet of paper for someone to cut it in half.

We asked a couple friends, no luck there... Finally we just reformatted the invites to fit two on a normal sheet of paper. The manfriend works part time at a university - where they have papercutters. Great. Problem solved.

Except.

I went to Joann's. I went to Target. I went to Staples. I went to Office Max. NO ONE has cream card stock. Let me save you many hours of running around town: go to a stationary store. Yes, it costs more, but you'll save money on gas. And frustration. And maybe even some tears.

At Office Max, I nearly printed the invitations. I tried to not care that the "cream" they had was "orange." I'm trying to not be That Bride. But I just couldn't do it. We're still using the envelopes from the invitation kits I bought at Target - the colors weren't even close.

And so... I went to the fancy paper store. I doubled the cost of our invitations. But we wound up with this beautiful, textured cream card stock. As paper goes, it really is quite beautiful. And the color matches perfectly.

The fancy paper printed beautifully in our cheap printer. Did the manfriend take them to work to cut? Did I take them back to Office Max so they could cut all of them for $2.00 (take that Kinko's!)? Well, no. The invitations weren't quite centered. So, I cut them. With a quilters ruler. And a rotary blade.

Because if we're going to do something ourselves, damn it - we will do it ourselves.

Carnage.