Envelope Emergency

As I wrote these words as the subject line of an email early on a Sunday morning, I couldn't resist noting their ridiculousness in the text of my email just below. Who has an "envelope emergency"? Hallmark? It just sounds ludicrous.

We had, at this point, spent something like 4 and a half months on our invitation suite, going back and forth with our designer to strike the right balance between "formal" and "vintage-y", trying to make sure our invite looked modern but still fancy. While I love wedding blogs, I'm not really a visual person, so it took a lot of time to get there. Add in the fact that certain pocketfolds only come in these 14 colors (that are not "our" color), and certain inserts only go into certain pocketfolds, and you can't print on certain envelopes, and...omg, I thought my head was going to explode. Oh, and lawyers + proofreading = absolute madness. I think Groomy was the first one of our invitation designer's customers to ever look up the correct French wording for R.S.V.P.

So, we get the invitations (gorgeous!), spend inordinate amounts of time assembling them, numbering the RSVP cards in invisible ink (in case someone forgets to write their name, we won't have to spend hours playing CSI: Home Edition to figure out who they are), folding 115 belly bands and tying 115 ribbons. Awesome. We send our envelopes off to the calligrapher complete with ridiculously organized excel guest list and custom-made envelope liner paper and wait.

We wait and wait until we're a few days past the "deadline" for mailing (1 month before the RSVP date). I don't freak out, because, hey, what's a few days? I'm Laid-Back Cool Bride.

Finally, I start to get a little antsy and, when the calligrapher tells me the envelopes are ready to ship, I ask her to overnight them, so we can get everything stuffed and stamped.

We get them on that glorious Sunday morning, as we're rushing out to meet with our day-of coordinator, and open the box excitedly. They're....pink...ish? Ok, weird, but not terrible. I guess brown meant something different to me than to her. I flip the envelope over to see gorgeous chocolate brown for the return address. Cool! 'Cept they don't match...oh well! Let's look at the lining I debated over for a week! Yay.

Oh...it looks...kind of like crap. It's crooked and there's glue spilling out of the side. It's not the same shape as the envelope. Oh. Hmmm. I'm kind of pissed at this point. I look at Groomy and flatly announce "I don't like them." this quickly escalates into "I am not sending our gorgeous invitations in thesecrappyenvelopesandifIwantedthemtolookcrappyIwould'vedonethemmyself...."

You see, gentle readers, this calligrapher charges a significant amount of money for these services. So when I got back work that looked like I could've done it at home for free while watching a Criminal Minds marathon on A&E, it made me a little cranky.

So, what to do? Calligrapher used all our envelopes, so we've got to get more, at least as a first step. This is when I sat down and typed the hurried "Envelope Emergency" email to my invitation designer, all the while laughing at myself just a little. In the end, everything turned out fine. Groomy and I scoured the city for similar envelopes, lined them ourselves, and found a new calligrapher. And, unlike the original plan for our envelopes, where I made most of the decisions and arrangements, we did it together. We had to change the style of the envelopes and the liners last minute, but I like ours better. And we will always have the memory of Groomy with my pink paper cutter showing me the right way to cut the liners and knowing that, no, I am not the queen of all things crafty and wedding and how glad I am that my fiance is here alongside me, working things out.