For Kathy's bachelorette party, a group of her close friends had brunch and then went to a private session at Color Me Mine. I decided to paint a teapot with the design I created for Kathy's invitations so that I could forever remember her wedding whenever I had a pot of tea.

It's nerve wracking to see how your creation will turn out after it's glazed. Colors turn brighter. Rough surfaces become glossy and smooth. And then you start thinking other things too... "Doh, I should have put one more coat of paint over this area," or "Oh so that shade of paint turned into this weird color?" I guess that's the beauty of homemade items... the mistakes and imperfections make it unique.


















Overall, Color Me Mine is a fun and therapeutic (only if you're given the whole day to paint) experience, but way beyond my budget to do often. If you're ever in Massachusetts, let's have a Boston Tea Party, yea? Har har...

I have seen my good share of mistakes commonly made on invitations. My holiday job at tiny*prints really made me anal about these things and they still bother me to this day. So I thought that I could make this post so that hopefully people can be aware and be grammatically correct in the future! :)






1. Ampersands (&) - The use of the ampersand is to note a close relationship between two people. It's appropriate to use to join the names of a couple, but with other relationships, not so much. So far I've worked on two weddings in which the bride's parents are divorced. When this is the case, it is usually better use the actual word "and," opposed to "&."

2. Time - A lot of invitations write out the time rather than going numerical (ex. three o'clock in the afternoon). You should know, though, that five o'clock is the cut off for afternoon--five o'clock in the evening is incorrect. It's only until six where evening begins. For events at 12:00 p.m., you can substitute with a simple "at noon."

3. Year - Now that we're in the 2000s, people get confused as to how to write out the year. "Two thousand ten" is correct, not "two thousand and ten." I'm not sure how we got used to throwing the "and" in there. We didn't say the year 1995 as "nineteen and ninety five," did we?

4. Apostrophes - Okay, this is the one that really bugs me because SO many people use it incorrectly. It also needs the most explaining because I think it boggles people's minds. Apostrophes are meant to show possession. It is not meant to be used to separate the 's' from the rest of the word. Let's take the Chinese last name "Lo" for example. I'm using this last name because I'm good friends with a married couple with the last name Lo, and so I constantly see it being misused by others. Secretly, I'm dying inside.

* More than 1 Lo = The Los (another ex. The Simpsons)... no apostrophe!

* Their residence = The Los' (possessive to both of them)

* In conclusion, using "Lo's" is never correct because it doesn't make sense.

Get it? Hahaha.

5. RSVP - It stands for Répondez s'il vous plaît in French, or in English "Please Reply." Therefore, stating "Please RSVP" is repetitive. You're basically saying "Please Please Reply." Instead, you can say "Kindly RSVP" or just plain 'ol "RSVP."


I hope this mini grammar-etiquette tutorial helped and opened your awareness to the popular pitfalls of invitation writing! It certainly did for me last year!

P.S. The photo above is from two years ago when I visited an art gallery in Denmark (where I studied abroad during college!).