3D love.

Remember a while back, when I was too cool for wedding planning? And all women who care about weddings are just trying to have some semblance of control so they don't have to face the terror that is a lifetime of someone else's dirty underwear? Man, I can be a jerk sometimes.

Let me tell you about my invitations.

Now, there are an awful lot of traditional wedding things that you can hurl right out the window. For example, the garter and bouquet tosses. Why do we still do this? It's awful. It was great when I was twelve and I used some basketball skills to block everyone else out and catch my cousin's bouquet. However, I was quickly informed that this kind of behavior was not appropriate. You're supposed to try and catch the bouquet but not too hard, I guess. The secret of those tosses is that the only people who actually enjoy the activity are the married people and the DJ, who gets to make tired jokes about women being desperate man-traps and men being afraid of commitment.

So, some traditions go and some stay. They tell you when you get married that you can do anything you want, because it's your wedding. Sometimes, when they find out what you want, they wish they hadn't told you that. But you can just cackle at them, because it's your wedding!

You do have to let people know about the wedding, so some kind of notification is required. And you know what? I like sending mail. It's my thing. So while things like ring pillows make me frown and try to think of a way around it, invitations have me doing google image searches. And in these google image searches, I saw some pop-up cards. I was instantly smitten. I could invite people in three dimensions!

My maid-of-honor and I spent a weekend with a borrowed Cricut, making my 3D dreams come true. Have you ever heard of a Cricut? It's sort of amazing. It's like a printer, except instead of printing things, it makes cuts. Scrapbookers use them a lot, and we used one to cut out the letters for our pop-up card.

Have you ever used a Cricut? It is not amazing at all. They provide free software for you to make your own design, in case you don't want to spend $40 on a special cartridge that does the specific thing you want (there is one for pop-up cards, as it happens). And I don't want to make any assumptions here, but I got the impression from the incredibly buggy, limited, and non-intuitive design software that they'd rather you just buy the cartridges. It took hours to get the design done, and then another few hours to get it to cut right on the paper. Then we had to cut each individual sheet, some of which turned out neater than others due to the how the Cricut was feeling from moment to moment. My MOH did most of the work, but I did bring her beer.

Oh, and that? That was step one. Step two was folding all the cut sheets. Then we had to cut out the backing paper (which makes the pop-up, uh, pop). We used pages I ripped out of atlases. Finally, there is a lot of gluing. I bought special glue, called paper cement, and using it gave me a headache. Also, we had to put something on the front of the card. I had Josh write a wedding-y poem, which also needed to be printed, cut, and glued. Seriously, I just made up a bunch of work for myself to do, I guess so I could then complain about how weddings are a lot of trouble.

Oh, but I do love how they turned out. I admit it, I am proud of me. They are personally designed and handmade. I was worried that they would end up looking a little too handmade. The trouble with all these steps (and any step involving a danged Cricut), is that each one introduces room for a small error. Add up all the little errors, and I'll have to start telling people I had my invitations made by a kindergarten class. Some of them turned out more perfect (or more imperfect) than others. But I feel like if I got this thing in the mail, I would really want to go to that wedding. And that's the whole point of an invitation. Not just to tell you about the occasion, but to make you want to go.