Krystal & Brandon Get Crafty

104!! That’s how many days are left until Brandon and I get married. 104?? 104!! This is simultaneously the MOST exciting and terrifying thought. 104 days! And I no longer find myself the laid back person I was six months ago, saying, don’t worry, it’ll get done (Imagine that!). Now it HAS to get done. Luckily we have most things taken care of.

We just finished making all the invitations. What a fun/painstakingly tedious and stressful task! They turned out really nice though! I can’t wait for everyone to see them. But, seriously… This little project gave me a new respect for crafts. So much so, that I went and found the invitation to the wedding of one of Brandon’s cousins, and set it aside on a shelf so it won’t get thrown away! After having spent so much time on ours, I feel guilty for every invitation I have ever thrown away, lol.

Ok so anyway, back to the making of the invitations… A few weeks ago Brandon and I were shopping at Michael’s. And to my surprise I stumbled upon this invitation kit on clearance. It was originally 40 bucks but had been knocked down to $15. $15 for 40 invitations… So we bought 3 boxes! You can’t beat $45 for 120 invitations (we only need about 100). Granted, these were nothing special, they were rather plain—all white with a white ribbon on top. Simple. So I told Brandon we could just decorate them to make them personal, it would be great! I was super excited (I’m still excited, or excited again, after seeing the finished product). I didn’t realize what an undertaking we were getting into. After many, many trial runs, hours of brain storming about just HOW to decorate these silly things, and many proto-types later, we finally settled on something that we both liked.

During the trial/brainstorming process I bought a rubber stamp that had a really nice, kind of vintage looking design. We both liked how it looked on the invitation and decided to go with it. But, before we could decide where to put it, we had to decide on design and wording. Brandon spent many frustrating hours at the computer trying to get a printed boarder on perfectly, he finally succeed. It fit perfectly around the un-textured edge the invitations had. Now that we had the boarder we could work on the wording, which was easy. Once we had the wording, we knew where to put the stamp. SOOO… we now had the task of hand stamping 100 invitations. But, Brandon, being the thinking man that he is, made a little wooden thing to place on the paper so we knew exactly where to stamp, which made it surprisingly easy-- love my fiancé!

To add a little something extra to the invitations I decided it would be neat to put two tinny tiny rhinestones on each invitation, one at the top of the stamp and one on the bottom. The look turned out nice, but the job took forever. The adhesive that originally came on the stones didn’t want to come off their plastic backing! So we ended up super gluing every single one… FUN! That’s 200 hand glued rhinestone, folks. Yep, we’re awesome, that’s right. Or crazy. Whichever.

The final touch was the ribbon. The invitations came with a white ribbon tied in a simple loop on top. Well, we replaced the white ribbon with a royal blue ribbon to match our colors. But we couldn’t figure out a way to tie the stinking ribbon so it didn’t get messed up when we put them in the envelopes to send them. Finally we found something that looked really neat, it required more ribbon than I we thought it would (longer piece) but thankfully, despite having cut a whole bunch of three inch ones for the way we THOUGHT we would tie them first, we still had enough left to cut 100 pieces of the now 15 inch pieces we would need. We ended up with EXACTLY what we needed (5 fish= 5,000, anyone thinking what I’m thinking?).

Now, I’ve been pretty good about not having any Bridezilla moments so far. And that’s good—we’re almost three months away! But, when it came time to printing the return address for the response cards I nearly lost it. We printed them from Brandon’s computer, but something about the placement, I’m not sure, it kept printing NOT in the center. A couple would come out good and the others would be too close to the top or too close to the bottom. Some looked AWFUL and some were just unusable, I’m not going to lie. The problem with this is: the invitations, response cards, the envelopes and the envelopes the response cards go in, all had a matching design texture, and we bought them on clearance! So it’s not like we could go buy more if we messed them up. You see my dilemma now? Ok, I digress-- back to the story at hand… Luckily, we had enough extra to not use the REALLY bad ones. They were getting so bad at one point I had to tell Brandon to stop printing. Brandon handled my mini-bridezilla moment well and we were both able to see the humor in the way I was behaving.

Everything turned out great and the finished product is beautiful! I can’t wait for you guys to see. We are doing a wax seal on the back, and that takes a while, so we still have that to do, but that’s the last thing. I had no idea that deciding to make our own invitations would be one of the longest tasks of the wedding so far! But, it was fun, I loved creating something special with Brandon that was one of a kind. 

This whole invitation making business has also taught me how anal I can be about some things. This was actually a shock for me, because I’m typically, like text-book type B personality. However, my thought was… it’s our wedding, if ANYTHING should be perfect it should be the invitations. But, really during this whole craft business, I actually RETURNED two silver pens because I didn't like the way they wrote! Seriously? Seriously.

Something else this whole process has made me realize is… how truly blessed I am to have Brandon. During the whole frustrating ordeal, never once did he loose his tempter with me, as I continually changed my mind about what I wanted and how the wording should be and if we should have a reception cards and whether it was ok to put the wedding website on the response card and on and on and on (pretty much being every kind of neurotic there is)... I realize that Brandon loves me a lot like God loves His children; mercifully and unconditionally. Brandon is so quick to forgive me when I know I have done something wrong or not treated him fairly. And never once in all the time we’ve been together has he ever held a mistake I’ve made against me. God truly knew what he was doing when he put us together. I thank Him for sending me someone to show me how to love like He loves!