DIY Distress

The one problem with deciding to make your own wedding invitations is the part where you realise that you have to send them out. And not just, you know, anonymously posted on the internet - you will be literally sending these things that you have spent months crafting, poured hours and hours of time into constructing, to every person you know and love.

Like that nightmare you had where you did something stupid in front of everyone you know and love.

When this realisation hits you - usually around the time you accidentally glue-gun one of the inserts slightly off-centre into one of the cards, or when you notice that the ink from the stamp has smudged a little around the edges, despite you hairspraying it twice for good measure - your stomach drops and you realise that maybe, maybe those things you've been working on since Christmas are in fact a little bit crap. And everyone knows you're making your own invitations because your mum has been telling everyone so proudly, but actually they're going to open the envelopes and see... these.

And it's too late to back out now because you'd never be able to get professional ones made in time, and of course because everyone knows you're making them yourself, they'll be really confused if they suddenly got non-homemade ones, so you'd have to answer questions about how it all went wrong, so it works out quicker if you just send out this trash and then people will be able to see just went wrong and will hopefully be British enough not to comment on it. Besides, it's not like there's anything you can do to fix it at this point.

Of course from there it starts to spiral.

What if nothing you've made for the wedding is any good? What if it's not just the invitations that suck, what if it all sucks?

And what if it's not just the stuff you made what if all the choices you have made, what if everything you picked for this wedding is going to look awful? What if once it's all put together it just looks like a hot mess of random colours and glue-gunned decorations, and everyone just sits there really awkwardly waiting until there's an appropriate point for them to leave so that they are no longer surrounded by all sorts of weird, poorly-coordinated things.

And then afterwards no-one will speak to you for a while, if ever again, because they've seen what's inside your mind and it wasn't nice for anyone.

And they're probably still all covered in glitter, even though you didn't use any glitter, but that's just the way these things always seem to turn out, with glitter stuck to people.

At this point you have to go and sit quietly somewhere and distract yourself in some non-alarming manner, possibly by watching a livestream of kittens, and take a lot of deep calming breaths.

After that you have to reaffirm yourself, it will be fine, people will like your things, and if they don't they will probably be too drunk to examine them too closely anyway, so it will work out either way.