Weddingbee

Okay, now that we have received reply cards back for a total of 17 confirmed guests at our wedding (score!), I think it’s safe to assume everyone has at least received their invites, which means it’s picture time!!!

Haha just one teaser pic until you read my review! [um, or scroll down…hehe]

As for the process, we looked at ten zillion completely different types of invites for MONTHS, since I decided this was one component I really cared a lot about and didn’t want to scrimp on (within reason!) When we looked at invites at Kate’s Paperie, we, unfortunately, fell in love with letterpress. Then came a long long stage of contemplation which resulted in “okay fine, if we find the perfect invite design and it’s letterpress for not toooo too much, then we’ll get them.” Followed by…weeks and weeks of looking at every letterpress design in existence! Right around this time, two things happened. 1) Miss Bird of Paradise posted about her invites (that she designed herself and had printed by Peter Kruty Editions), and 2) I was taking a continuing ed graphic design class…with a girl who introduced herself as working for a letterpress printer…named Peter Kruty!

So as the semester came to an end and our invite search wasn’t much closer to getting resolved…I finally got up the nerve to approach her in the hallway (or was it the bathroom? I forget, but let’s just focus on how much of a loser I am for spending weeks nervously thinking “I should ask her about letterpress!!”) She was super duper nice, brought me some samples to the next class, and talked about all the different options (designing myself or having them design us custom invites, etc) at quite reasonable rates (disclaimer: “reasonable” for letterpress, also known as Satan’s Way of Extracting Money From People Who Like Pretty Things.) We chatted about it all a bit more and agreed to wait until after the holiday season was over and then we could drop by the studio in January or February to actually talk design.

We went, we met one of the owners, we saw TEN ZILLION GORGEOUS EXAMPLES of other invites, and we were hooked. I sent them a very crude mockup of the general idea I wanted, and they found images for me, played around with fonts and alignment and everything was super dandy. We picked out papers and envelopes, and were super excited and rejoicing over our great luck!

Then…they just didn’t reply to an email for a while. So we emailed them again. Aaand again. And again. It was still fairly early in the process so we weren’t panicky and admittedly didn’t try that hard to get in touch with them. For example, we didn’t even pick up the phone. Until we realized it had been literally to the day a month since our last contact from them. Then we started getting a bit panicky and called them a bunch, finally got ahold of one of the owners who informed us that the person we’d been working with was now on vacation? So she’d take care of us now. Okay, cool, nice long conversation about what we want for insert & reply cards, sent her the necessary text….

Two more weeks go by with no contact. We don’t want to be needy, but we send a couple polite little “um, get a chance to do this yet? please just let us know!” kind of emails, then finally start the calling again. Sigh. This time, she sends up the finished proofs and they are DAZZLINGLY PERFECT so after one or two minor tweaks, she sends them off to make…plates? Some fancy letterpress word….and then within a week we had our envelopes, and less than a week after that our entire sets.

And OH MY GOD I swear I had never seen anything so beautiful. (I apologize to my kitten and anyone whose baby I have ever coo’ed at.)

So to summarize:
1. Communication/work style: Everyone we talked to was seriously as nice as can be (and dude, their dog is frickin’ awesome), and they alluded to some personal problems that were presumably slowing things down a bit more than normal. They were all superduper nice and I could NOT have been more impressed with the work they did for us, but I am seriously soooo far from a Type A always-in-control kind of person, and they really had me flipping out wondering if we were going to have to photocopy our invites off a handwritten sheet because they got to us so late and with so little communication leading up to it. It really doesn’t take long to say “Sorry, things are crazy right now, I won’t be able to get the revised proofs to you for another week” and it makes me not flip out. Please please don’t make me flip out. All in all, we got them mailed out a week or two later than we were planning to, so not the end of the world. Just lots and lots of flipping out. Thou shalt not get between a bride and her invites without at least giving her an estimated delivery date!!

2. The Finished Product: GODDAAAAAAMN I cannot say enough times how fantastic they turned out!!!! The design work they did for us was soooooooo incredible (I think) and the letterpress is SUCH stunning quality and oooooooooh one more time I have to say it’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen!!!!! Siiigh, yes I really do just gaze at them. Both my mom and Mr. Bluebell expressed a slight degree of skepticism regarding my sanity in insisting on letterpress, and the second they saw them both said “ohhhhhh it was worth it!” Of all my wedding purchases so far, this is one of the ones I love the most. Sooo worth the (absurd amount of) money (to us)!!! Oh how I love them.

And as a reward for anyone who read all that (and I mean really read!), I know have a gazillion pictures! The lighting was pretty crappy when I took these pictures but the tree and the colored paper are all a pale grey-blue that you can’t quite tell here. The invite itself and envelope are Arturo “soft white” (beautifully creamy) and the writing/birds is a rich chocolate brown! Eeeee I love them! Okay, for real, now:

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