When Wedding Invitations Turn Into a Hilarious Disaster

Misspellings. Unfortunate acronyms. Unauthorized alterations. Venues that literally ceased to exist. Amazing uses of postage.

The disaster stories you shared in response to this week’s PTQ query on what went wrong when it came to your wedding invitations were varied and hilarious. Let’s get to them. Pass the lamb chops.

We’ll start with this one, from the aptly named EditKitten:

When our wedding invitations arrived, I carefully proofread — which I had actually done when I ordered them, FYI — to make sure everything was kosher. I’m an editor and my husband is a writer, so this isn’t something we fuck around with.

My fiance’s middle name was misspelled. Instead of “Lawrence,” it was “Lawrerence.” Fortunately, I was alone in my apartment, so I had a three-minute freakout, then calmed down and called our coordinator to point out her mistake (confirmed: her error).

Coordinator: Are you sure it’s misspelled? Looks right to me.

Me (calmly but pointedly): I’m marrying him. I’m an editor. I am positive this is wrong.

New, correct invites arrived within a week, so certainly not a “disaster” in the grand scheme of things. But misspelling the groom’s name? Yeah, not gonna let that slide.

This is Gawker’s own Lauren Bertolini who is seriously just this nice. This one goes, I think, beyond a “relatively minor” screw up and into “did you fry the good judgment part of your brain, lady??”

This was relatively minor, but made me feel like a bridezilla.

The woman who designed our save the dates was a little over eager in her own PR campaign. She sent our Save The Dates out to a handful of bridal blogs the same day that she mailed them to us. I was… not thrilled to start receiving emails from friends and families that they’d seen our save the date online before I’d even had a chance to mail them.

Stay tuned on the invites (happening now)! A fun problem: Our moms have the same first and middle names, and neither of their last names match our last names, confusing!

Here was a surprise: What’s up with people altering your invitations without your knowledge? I did not see that coming.

ThimbleThief

This didn’t happen to me exactly, but it’s still pretty awesome. So my aunt was getting married (c.1982), a few years before I existed, and her wedding color was a light mauve. She picked out nice mauve invitations with dark text which were surprisingly elegant considering it was the early 80s. She gave them to her mom (my grandma) to mail and that was that. Fast forward to about 5 years ago and I’m cleaning out a closet in my Grandma’s home. I come across a mauve invitation with this huge orange fabric flower glued to the top. I look inside and see that it was an invitation for my aunt’s wedding. Of course, as soon as possible after my discovery I make fun of my aunt for her terrible taste and she asks me what I’m talking about. Turns out, when my Grandma was given the invites to mail back in the 80s she didn’t think they were “fancy” enough, so she glued these flowers to them without mentioning it to my aunt, who never would have found out were it not for me.

Not a surprise? Tales of hapless grooms.

sunbar

I received an invite to a family member’s wedding- invite, reception details, reply card and a small, stamped, SEALED envelope. I thought maybe the envelope accidentally got sealed going through the mail, but turns out, the groom licked and stamped all the reply envelopes inside the invites.

Even less of a surprise? Hapless brides. We’re equal opportunity disasters!

BexGM

So I wanted to design my own invitations. And we were being frugal so I went to some website and designed and ordered my own cards myself. I was really into having this be MY thing. I was going to get them just like I wanted and I really played with formats and got creative. My partner gave me full reign and I didn’t even ask anyone for input. This was my THING.

Long story short: perfect colors, perfect font, perfect sensibility. But I forgot the date. The goddamn date. And since I had done it all myself, there was no one else to blame.