Last summer, my parents were kind enough to throw Mr. Peacock and me an engagement party. We made several different types of of hors d’oeuvres, fun party drinks and had a cocktail party in my parents’ backyard. My mom loves to garden and in the late summer the flowers are coming up everywhere. It was nice to be able to break up our crazy long engagement with a little celebration.
I had been playing around with the idea of making my invitations and I took advantage of the party as an excuse to play with my tools. I was inspired by a stamp (”Cottage Bloom”) that I bought at last year’s Paper Source Paper Wedding event. I used a watermark stamp pad and light gold powder to create the pretty, shiny flower. I had to test out several different combinations of stamp pad + embossing powder to get to just the right shade of warm gold. I paired it with some pretty blue (”Lake”) cards and ivory cardstock. Here are the results:

Stamping
Powdering

Drying

Invite Done!
The ivory cards were 4.5×4.5 and the blue cards are 5×5. Cutting squares was pretty easy, compared to my previous forays into cutting rectangles. I loved using the embossing powders and I even had fun picking out the fonts. It was also nice to give my newly acquired embossing dryer a test run. This experience taught me two things- 1) I can totally make my wedding invitations and my mom and I might even enjoy it and 2) I really don’t want to make my wedding invitations. I will commit to the save the dates, the direction cards, the menus and place cards. A girl can only do so much without a printing press.
I know a lot of you are making your invitations. Anyone want to convince me that I should go for it?
Any other words of wisdom for those venturing into that arena?
Miss Peacock, you’re a graduate student, right? I don’t know how life is in your field of study, but in mine — my hours are long, my patients is tested (and tested again, and tested again, and then the day before a committee meeting ALL YOUR CELLS DIE AND RUIN THE EXPERIMENT YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING ON FOR 3 MONTHS). Ahem. Back to the point at hand — I’m in oncology/chemistry, and my life is hell right now. And I decided to make my own invitations a while ago, not really thinking things through.
Within the span of the next 3 weeks, I have my first thesis committee meeting, a major presentation that my PI asked ME to do for a major collaborating lab, a trip to present my preliminary data to a pharmaceutical company which may start production of the drug we’re developing, two bridal showers to attend, and 150 invitations to design, Gocco, assemble, and drop in the mail.
Word of advice. If your realm of graduate school is half as hectic as my realm of graduate school, hire someone else to make your invitations. If your program is 9-5 and you have lots of free time, then it’s different, but when I’m working 14-16 hour days, 7 days a week, the LAST thing in the world I want to think about when I get home is the invitations. And if I run out of time and am forced to choose between throwing my time into the invitations or my research, well… then everyone is getting e-vites to the wedding, because I can’t let my research suffer on behalf of some crazy invitations I decided to make. If I could go back and do it again, I’d be willing to shell out however much money it took to have someone else do these for me!