Weddingbee boards

My sister used to be a stationery designer for a local fine stationer. (Due to legal issues surrounding the owner of the company, she chose to leave the company at the beginning of the year to avoid losing her job if the company went under).

Anyways, she told us from the very beginning of our engagement that she wanted to design our invites. We went into the store over a year ago and most of the designs we liked, she was quoting us $900 dollars for the styles we liked (with thermography, not engraved). Later I told her that was a little out of our budget and we would like to explore other options (such as flat printing, which could be done much cheaper in-store).

When she found out about the above mentioned legal issues, she let us know about a month before she left the company that we should order our paper. I specifically told her "we don't want to stress you out with having to print them at home, we'll explore other options".  Still, she insisted that she had to make our invitations for us and basically forced us into purchasing $600 worth of paper from Envelopments. However, at the time the paper was understood to be our only expense, as she claimed to be able to print the invitations on her color printer at home. So we ordered the paper two weeks before she left the company.

A few months later, we learned that she had not started any designs for the invitations and had given all of the information to another designer at her former employer to design them. First she told us there were two pieces on shiny cardstock that could not be printed at home and had to be printed at the store (at our expense, unplanned).We reluctantly agreed (what else could we do??) and she quoted us over $200 for just those two pieces. We were both shocked as each flat printed piece was being quoted at over one dollar a piece just for flat printing (they were already cut to size)! 

Then, suddenly, two weeks before we planned to send the invitations, we learned that my sister did not print any of the invitation elements at home, she had the store design and print ALL the pieces of the invitation (which we HAD NOT agreed to). Which cost us just 20 dollars shy of $500. I was so mad at that point I didn't know what to do. I didn't tell her I was upset and pulled it out of our budget. 

We ended up paying nearly double what we had originally budgeted, and while the invites did turn out beautiful, we didn't have that much budgeted - they turned out more expensive than the original invites with thermography that she told us NOT to pick because she could flat print these other ones much more reasonably. 

I've been losing sleep over this for the past month because I can't help but feel like my sister took on this task even when she knew she didn't have the time to take care of it, and even then didn't give us the option of trying to get quotes from other printers in the area. 

How should we deal with this? Is it fair to tell my sister we're upset at the unanticipated expense? We've had to cut corners now in other elements that were more important to us to cover the expense of invitations we didn't agreeto have printed so expensively.

Wow. I think you have a right to be unhappy - definately not what you had planned! But at the same time, what can be done about it now? Is it really worth causing a strain between you and your sister? Take it from someone who knows, your relationship with your sister is worth more than any dollar amount. But that's my personal, totally biased opinion. :)