It's happened. My first wedding mishap.
So a few weeks back, I noticed a Groupon for Vistaprint. $17 for $70 worth of product. Sounds good, right? I mean I know Vistaprint isn't exactly a high-end printer, but a friend has been using them for all her wedding stuff and is quite pleased with them. The stuff she's had printed looks just fine. So I figured I could give it a try, and if they stunk, I would only be out $17. After all the wedding is like, 10 months away.
But THEN I got an email from Vistaprint about their "bridal blowout sale" and everything was 50% off. "Sa-weet", I thought. "I bet I can combine these sales and get my save the date cards AND invitations for $17!"
Oh, how wrong I was. Sort of. Combining the offers didn't seem to work. Then I discovered on weddingwire.com that there were LOTS of forum threads devoted to specific tactics to massage your Vistaprint cart into giving you a nearly free order. People were claiming to have $200 of stuff in their cart and paying less than $10 including the shipping.
There were many steps involved. Lots of clicking on this and clicking on that and closing the window and opening another window and then clicking on this secret link and then adding something else to your cart to get the shipping to drop.... wow, it got confusing fast.
I spent HOURS playing this game. No joke. (I'm pretty determined to stick to my budget.) But I played around with it until the cart said my order was free, with $10 shipping. This was for about 60 save-the-date cards and 60 invitations. I figured $17 groupon + $10 shipping was not a bad price to pay for the stuff that, at full retail, would be about $1 per. The people on weddingwire were like "you should have done x, y and z and you would have gotten a better deal" but at that point I was really sick of it all and was fine with the price.
It's been a week since I placed the order and have received no shipping email, so I logged into Vistaprint today to check the status of my order. And that's when I saw it.
I neglected to put the date of the wedding on the save-the-date cards.
*Sigh*
For being a reportedly "detail-oriented" person, this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened to me. In high school I was asked to draw an illustration for the school play, "A Midsummer Night's Dream." I worked hard on creating a cool illustration in which the branches of trees spelled out the title. It was very detailed and painstaking. I proudly showed it to the principal, who immediately pointed out with stifled laughter that I had misspelled it. I was mortified.
The thing is, when you're looking hard at the details, you can miss something really obvious. Does anyone remember that commercial in which a maintenance guy on a football field was meticulously painting letters onto the grass, trimming each blade carefully, and when he stepped back, saw that he misspelled it?
While I was pondering things such as whether to ask for the "honor" or "honour" of my guest's presence, or contemplating if I should format the time as "6 pm" or "Six o'clock in the evening", I had missed a KEY component.
The invitations look fine, but the save-the-dates are junk because Vistaprint won't allow you to cancel or change any order, for any reason, period. But now I'm faced with a dilemma:
1. I could just not sent out save-the-dates: just send out invitations later. Our families already know the date, and I could give friends a heads-up on facebook.
2. I could re-order save the dates from vistaprint. I liked that they were going to match. But that will involve more money.
3. I could get save-the-dates elsewhere. Maybe Michael's or ACMoore has some OK cheap ones.
4. I could print my own. This was my original plan. I had found a template I liked and bought some nice paper a long time ago. I would still have to buy envelopes.
I guess I'll wait and see how the invitations look first.
Moral of the story: Have someone else proofread your invitations and stuff before you place your order!