Fiberwhore is getting Hitched!

Second time is the charm right? Oh it's third? Well we are going with second....

So for the next six or so months wedding me will be taking over the blog! Mostly so I can bitch and moan about how ridiculous weddings are of course. And of course it will be a mostly DIY wedding so hopefully I can add something useful to this as well.

I've already gotten a jump start on the planning. The first thing to get reserved was the photographer of course. I am choosing Volkel Image. He did a friends wedding and the pictures were fantastic! Pricey but so is the wedding and what use is all that money spent if you don't have great pictures to help remember it by?

I'm getting a head start on invites, decorations, lighting and rentals. What I'm not so excited about doing is finding a DJ, baker, caterer, florist and officiant.

So far one of the greatest challenges has been addresses. Getting them how to write them, FRUSTRATING!!!!!!! So I stole the bright idea from a friend who had done the same, to put an event invite up on Facebook to get friends and families to send us addresses since I have none of them...

If you are thinking about doing this DON'T. Worse idea ever. While about 20 of the people who I added to the "Event" bothered reading the event title and description and actually sent me their addresses, the rest either didn't respond at all or thought that it was the actual invitation to the wedding! GRRRRR!

The problem is that sometimes you want to send an invite to people even though you know there isn't a snow balls chance in hell that they will make it. It's more than irritating having someone write on your event wall, "JACK AND JULIE SMITH WILL NOT BE ATTENDING!!!!!" Names were changed but yes, that happened. In all caps. Thanks for being subtle Julie.

So I've deleted those who already given me their address and those who decided they will not attend. I'll send out one more message and then the whole disaster will be going away.

Thankfully my very lovely sister- and mother-in-law to be got together the huge list of addresses from his family. It was 50 some people, and I'm very sorry but second cousins aren't getting the automatic invite. There are a few that he is close enough to that they bothered to give me their address so they will get an invite.

In the end I decided to go through the list of originally invited, have Mr. Get Lucky do the same and sent them individual messages asking for their address which worked much better.

Now I have a list of 125 households and such that need to be sent invites. I know that about half of those won't attend. After all this is a second marriage for the both of us, his family lives 1000 miles away and they all attended the first one. I'm sure that most of my side should attend since my first wedding was more of like a backyard picnic and dinner for our immediate family (all 10 of us including the officiant). So I designed the invites and realized that the postage cost more than the invites! I have to fight the urge to cheap and not put a RSVP card in with the invites going to people I know won't come. Or to put the RSVP card in but not stamp it..... Also it is a good thing that I have til May to get these things put together as well.

So there is now way I'm paying someone to do Calligraphy on 125 envelopes, inner envelopes, return card envelopes, etc. Not when there are enough pretty fonts out there that I can run them through my printer and have a nice result. But now I'm trying to figure out exactly what the proper way is to write so and so's name. Should I address it to Mr. and Mrs. Jack Smith? Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jane Smith? Mr. and Mrs. Jack and Jane Smith? I'm supposed to include children's names on the inner envelope but even Mr. Get Lucky doesn't know all their names. Do I spell out Northeast or abreaviate NE, do I right out Sixtyfifth Street? It gets a little long when I have to write 122345 Sixty fifth Avenue Northeast Number 23456. Why is there no consensus on the right way to do it?

So what is your biggest invitation pet peeve?