Special Delivery
As I write this, I’m in my home office in Ontario, but when it goes live on Wedding Obsession Monday, I’ll be sittin’ pretty by a pool in California. Woo hoo! This pasty Canadian girl is spending the weekend visiting friends and the super exciting Cream event in LA. Bring on the sunshine and palm trees.
It dawned on me that it would be a nice idea to bring the girls’ invitations with me. So I assembled two from the box that has largely been ignored since it arrived. (That’s right, I’m totally in denial about hand-addressing all those envelopes.)
Et voila!
We love love love how our invites from Cheer Up Press turned out. Alaina customized a design from her Etsy shop to fit our colour scheme.
To quote my dad, “Why the heck are you buying invitations from Ohio?!”
Good question.
Please forgive me, I’m about to climb on my soap box.
I know and love many invitation designers in my area, and I always try to search for Canadian sellers first when sourcing items… But sometimes I come across something so awesome and perfect, that I have to have it, no matter where it’s from. And that was the case with the design that inspired our invitations. They were a perfect compliment to the look planned for our wedding.
While lots of DIY-ers find inspiration from real designs, I recognize the difference between “inspiration” and “copying” and it was important to me to support a small business, Canadian or not. So rather than saving money and having a friend copy the design for us, I reached out to Alaina. She was wonderful to work with, replying promptly to any of my questions. Not only did she come up with some great suggestions to tweak the design of the whole invitation suite and make it our own, but she also helped me source the right details such as our pocket folds.
Can you imagine for a second how designers must feel when they come across copies of their hard work? Copycats are, unfortunately, running rampant even on Etsy . Pinning something for inspiration for your own crafting endeavours is one thing, however recreating something entirely and taking credit for the design is another. This is a person’s intellectual property, this is their source of income. And as someone who makes a living in a creative field, I just wouldn’t be able to blog about my wedding proudly if I was essentially stealing someone’s designs. So on multiple occasions when I showed my fiancée options for wedding paper goods and he suggested having a friend or colleague recreate it for us, I insisted on purchasing directly from the original designer.
As much as I love to save money, being fair and supporting independent designers is important to me. (Never mind the fact that I won’t bother with a DIY of any kind unless I’m 100% certain I’ll do it right the first time. Rather than flubbing it and paying twice; once for my supplies and a second time for the professional to do things properly.) Also important to explain, we still came in under budget on our invitations and only paid about $25 in customs. Most of the items I’ve ordered from the US for the wedding haven’t had customs fees at all.
So I hope you’ll forgive me for my rant, and consider this, the next time you pin something “for inspiration” with plans to recreate it. Why not look in to the source and consider supporting small business? In the long run, how much money and time are you really saving by doing it yourself?
Rant over. If you don’t hate me, I’ll be back in the cold white north soon enough, to return to my bride-to-be blogging and planning duties, and most likely continuing to procrastinate about addressing all of those wedding invites.
- Krista
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