You're Invited

As of this past Monday our invitations are officially in the mail and we've already gotten some great feedback from our guests. I have to say that so far doing our invitations was the hardest most tedious part of wedding planning.

In order to save some dough we decided to print and assemble the invitations ourselves using one of the invitation sets from Michael's. We bought our invitations back in December and I noticed when I was there this past weekend they've added a lot more designs that are all really cute. I definitely recommend checking them out for an affordable DIY option. Not to sound bias (though I totally am) but I think ours look way more expensive than they were.

It definitely wasn't an easy process. I started working on these at the beginning of February and finally finished at the end of March. Granted I worked on these a little bit at a time so as to not cause physical harm to my printer which seemed to enjoy eating my labels. It took me a while to get our wording to fit into the template and print everything off so that it was lined up properly.

I also decided to make it much harder on myself by foregoing the pre-tied black ribbons that came with the invites and instead buy and tie pink ribbons to give a pop of color. If I never tie another ribbon in my life I will be thrilled. I became a bit OCD about it and needed them to be "perfect" and drove myself crazy in the process.

I should mention that I was also able to save money on these due one of my very generous vendors at work who offered to buy all our stamps as a wedding gift to us and therefore saved us around $60. I decided to make life a bit easier by just using the wedding stamps offered by the post office rather than the fancy personalized stamps via Zazzle. After all people don't really pay much attention to the stamps right? Right.

Anyway, here are pictures of our invitations which I'm really proud of. Please pardon my black squiggles, I didn't want the crazies from the Internet stalking my guests or crashing my wedding.

I decided to purchase white outer envelopes so that the inner black envelope wouldn't get destroyed during the delivery process. I had wanted to print the addresses directly onto the envelopes but couldn't get my printer to cooperate so I went with the labels. Not my first choice but I think it looks okay. These weighed over 1 ounce so I had to use the $.61 stamp. **Always weigh your invites before you stamp and mail.

Here is the inner black pocket envelope. I decided to write out everyone's name by hand with a silver pen. I don't have the best handwriting but I think it added a nice personal touch.


The black pocket envelope sealed.


Ta-Da! I think the pink bow really makes it! On the left side are two pockets holding our guest information card, RSVP card and return envelope.

Here is our response card and return envelope. If you click on the picture you can see the wording. One tip I read about online was to number the back of each response card and have the numbers match up to a master guest list. That way if a guest sends back the response card without their name written in you can still know who it's from by checking the number on the back against your master list. We also wrote in the number of seats reserved for each particular invite. Hopefully this will prevent people from bringing everyone they know.


Here's the response card tucked in the return envelope. **This particular RSVP card isn't the one that goes with the black pocket invite shown above since that person is allowed to bring a guest and therefore has 2 seats reserved for them.

This is our guest information card. I'm hoping people will take advantage of our wedding website to get any information they need rather than emailing/calling me non-stop. Unfortunately our names are too long to fit on one line :(

Here's the card without the ribbon. If you click on the picture you can see the wording better. I found the wording from a few different websites and blogs and combined a few options together. I really love the wording since we are the ones hosting the wedding and I wanted to convey how important our guests are to us.

So that's it. After many many many hours these are finally done and I couldn't be more thrilled with the results. Now we just have to wait for the RSVP's to start rolling in.