Wedding Invitations (and minor injuries)

Much to my mum’s bewilderment, I have grown up to be a person who enjoys crafts and the art of making something from nothing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the type who insists on making all their own clothes out of hand spun yak wool or anything, but I do like knitting hats and scarves and other pretty things that are simple to make and difficult to get wrong.

So, partly because it was expected, and partly because I was full of inspiration, I decided at an early stage that I was going to make our wedding invitations with my own fair hands. It only took one shopping trip to ensure I was equipped with both the enthusiasm and the necessary goodies to start my one-woman production line.

Sadly, it did not take long for my enthusiasm to decline into ‘make a single proto-type invitation, before leaving the remaining materials to sit untouched in a bag for months’. After several weeks of waiting for the inspiration to return, I decided to move the untouched bag into another room to stop myself from feeling so guilty about the distinct lack of progress being made.

A further three weeks passed, and I had only managed to construct a further 5 invitations. Despite my fervent hopes, they didn’t magically multiply into the required number on their own and I began to realise why people often chose the easy route of paying someone with more motivation to get the job done.

Then we hit the ‘six months left until the Big Day’ milestone, and I panicked. If I didn’t get myself into production mode, we would be the only people partying at our wedding. It was time for action.

My fingers were nimble and swift as I cruised through the creation of the first five invitations. I giggled smugly to myself, and wondered exactly why I had put this task off for so long when it was so damn easy.

I was mid-smug-giggle when I stopped production to peel some ribbon off my index finger. The smile started to fade, before disappearing completely as I noticed I had to peel a ribbon-less invitation off my other hand. Upon further inspection, I realised that my hands were pretty much entirely covered in glue, and bits of wedding invitation.

Mainly thanks to my ability to act on impulse without thinking things through properly, I tried to wipe the gluey residue off my fingers with a tissue. Obviously, all I managed to do by pursuing this course of action was to stick bits of tissue to myself, which was not a particularly helpful development at this stage in proceedings.

Determined not to let my adhesiveness interrupt the flow of work that I had managed to produce, I persisted with my increasingly sticky fingers and knocked out another five invitations. I had found The Zone and became a blurred frenzy of wedding invitation creation as card after card was finished. I got to a tally of fifteen freshly produced cards, and ignored his rumbling stomach as I asked Fiance to put off dinner for another hour so as not to lose the momentum I had found.

Eventually, my fierce determination to make wedding invitations was overtaken by Fiance's determination to eat, and I was forced to bring a halt to my creative streak. I'll be honest - I was grateful for a reason to stop because by this time, I had sustained a grand total of three ridiculously painful papercuts and had transformed my hands into a combination of glue, glitter, tissue and odd bits of ribbon. Most importantly though, I had actually crafted thirty-five completely inconsistent, but entirely hand-made wedding invitations. (I am labelling the inconsistency as ‘charming’ rather than something I should endeavour to fix, for the general purpose of maintaining my sanity). Our rough guestimations led us to believe there were only fifteen or so more cards needed before we had the required number ready for dispatch.

I slept soundly that night, satisfied that a great day’s work had been done and that major inroads had been made towards letting our guests know about our wedding. I was similarly imbibed with positive feelings when I woke the next morning - until I tried to move, at which point I was somewhat shocked to be greeted with a stab of pain introducing itself to my lower back. This was not how my day of wedding-related-smugness was meant to be begin.

You see, in my invitation-induced frenzy the night before, I had made the mistake of putting my productivity before my posture, the latter of which was completely disregarded as the hours passed and my determination to continue persisted.

 

As a reward for me spending the night hunched over our wedding invitations, I had been blessed not with a spring in my step and a smile on my face, but with a severely tweaked muscle in my back. The next couple of days saw me wincing every time I moved, cursing every time the knuckle-based papercut re-opened itself and ever grateful that Fiance decided food was more important than indulging my feverish determination to finish the job in one sitting.

And that is a true story about how making my own wedding invitations led to silly injuries that were prevented from being worse by a hungry Fiance. I guess I owe his stomach one.