ilee

The invitations were gorgeous - we got lots of compliments. But, working with the artist was more than a challenge. I think if we didn't have a specific look in mind, she would have felt less pressure. But, we may not have gotten what we wanted. We saw the artist and her work at a Wedding Show in Seattle in January 2007 and were immediately impressed with her fun and formal style and ability to do letter press - something we didn't think we could afford. We had an in-person meeting to discuss the look and feel of our invitations, to pick out the papers and ribbons to be used, etc., in her design studio north of Seattle. Everything seemed pretty clear. The problem is she missed two deadlines - she was delayed by over a week in getting our invitations finished, thereby pushing out when we could send the invitations. Then, she missed her second deadline, and forced me to drive to other parts of town doing other errands while she still didn't quite finish putting together the invitations - we had to stuff the RSVP, envelope, OOT BBQ invite, and map cards into the invitation ourselves. While doing this, we noticed many of the OOT BBQ invites were either not centered on the page, or cut too close to the edge of the letter-pressed graphic. We asked that she do them again, and make sure that the OOT BBQ invites were 1/4 page - the same size of the RSVP card and maps. I drove to Seattle the next day (we live an hour south of Seattle) to pick up the new cards and they *still* weren't the right size, although they were at least now centered. So, I had to go to Paper Source and buy 1/4 sheet black card stock and we had to glue all the OOT BBQ invites together before sending the OOT invites. Also, somewhere along the line a pink matting disappeared from the invitation proofs - therefore, part of our invitation was never realized. English is a second language for the artist; getting the wording just right on the invitations - with appropriate spelling and grammar - was the biggest headache, as she only seemed able to make one correction at a time.

So, yes the invitations were gorgeous. But, we worked really, really hard to get them that way and probably made the artist never want to work with us again.