Wedding Invitations Are Out!

I have been ITCHING to write this post for a long time.  And now I finally can because our wedding invitations *should* all have arrived at their destinations by now.  That's right, we sent our invitations out last Friday!

[caption id="attachment_880" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Chloe helps me get the invitations ready to go."][/caption]

I hear people say how much they love paper all the time, and because of this fact, I've kind of started to internally roll my eyes every time someone says how much they love paper.  I know its hypocritical because I've said it too, but I've slowly come to realize that everyone - or at least everyone I know - loves paper.  It is such a luxury, its like loving flowers on Valentine's day or like loving a great pair of Manolos!  Duh, everyone loves them!  But then, when I look at these invitations, guess what I think about?  How much I too love paper!  In fact, it pained me to put redactions on these photos, that is how much I loved our invitations.  So I hereby promise to stop rolling my eyes at all you paper lovers out there!

[caption id="attachment_881" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The full suite!"][/caption]

We had an itty bitty invitation budget because J. is not quite so enamored with paper as I am, and we had to prioritize.  I'm not kidding, it was seriously itty bitty.  Try to imagine the cheapest bridal store you know of, and then think about the fact that I probably couldn't afford their invitations.  I am in no way saying that our budget was not adequate (I welcomed the challenge!), but I had a real champagne taste-beer budget problem.  That is when I found My Gatsby.  Their website really doesn't help their cause (the invites don't look as appealing online as in-person), but when I logged on, I found cute invitations with monograms that I thoght might work for us.  And when I ordered samples, they literally sent me a huge batch of swatches with every single kind of paper they work with.  I was floored by the reasonableness of the prices and the quality of the products.  The thermography had a nice feel, and the paper quality, while not super thick, was quite nice considering how affordable they were.  We had to make some concessions for paper weight, but for something people will throw away, we decided it was worth it.

Closeup, with and without the belly band.

One of the ways we saved money with My Gatsby was to design our invitation ourselves (i.e., myself).  Its a little risky if you are typo-prone like I am, but they have an online preview tool- so as long as you can recruit your 25 favorite spell-checking lawyerly friends to read it like I did, you can rest assured your invitations will read ok.  And you can also pay a little extra to have My Gatsby help you with that!  I also saved money by skipping the inner envelope (I also like that this saves paper, yay earth)!  Instead, I ordered sheets of cardstock to match my gold envelopes, cut those sheets into one-inch strips, and turned them into belly bands.  The belly bands took some time and some folding patience (using a bone folder and grid-guide) but they really added some polish to the suite.

[caption id="attachment_884" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Maps and hotel info!"][/caption]

Another way we saved money was by getting creative with enclosure cards.  We splurged with a two-color invitation and reception card, but for our response card we limited the printing to one color.  We figured that since people would mail them back to us, nobody would notice or care if they were printed in all-green, and that helped our bottom line.  I also made the maps with hotel information on Vista Print (see previous blog post on this topic here).  One enclosure card in two colors ran about $60 for 100, whereas Vista Print cards ran about $6, so I saved more than $50 on this step.

[caption id="attachment_886" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="And the address labels in action (and yes, we did send one to the President)!"][/caption]

And a further way I saved money was by skipping calligraphy (you may recall my love of calligraphy from the past).  I really, really, really wanted calligraphy, but at $1-$3 per invitation, it was not going to work for us.  Instead, I had my friend Sarah at Belletristics make custom address labels for our invites.  Yes, I slaved over these, between putting the addresses on the computer, cutting out the labels, using the bone folder, and then adhering them to evelopes without making them crooked.  It was a labor of love.  But I asbolutely loved how they turned out!!  Even J., paper curmudgeon that he is, was impressed and excited to send them out!

[caption id="attachment_1100" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Love these!"][/caption]

And of course, we used our king and queen of hearts stamps too- they worked perfectly because we needed exactly $.88 postage- so each envelope received both a king and a queen- it was meant to be!

I was a little bit sad to let these guys go, but I am so thrilled that our invitation- the first true impression of our wedding that our guests will receive- is everything I'd hoped it would be!