Weddingbee Blog

I know I’m famous for giving y’all half the details, and I’m going to do it again.

The invitations went in the mail yesterday, so I’ll show you the packaging, and we’ll talk about the actual invitations when they’ve reached the majority of our guests.

I obsessed over these for months. I’m immensely proud of them. I’m a nurse, remember? I have no graphic design experience at all. And I only had to ask for help once.

And I am head over heels in love with our invitations.

We went with a standard #10 envelope, in Stardream Onyx. Metallic paper was an early obsession and I couldn’t resist it. I think it added a lot of dimension to the suite. Texture and dimension were so important to me.

I knew once I’d picked black envelopes, I would have to do something different with the addresses, because I obviously couldn’t write on a black envelope. Plus, I also fell in love with Martha’s wrap around labels early on. I asked the hive for some help designing them a few months back, and decided to go with one font for ease.

I designed the labels in paint.net and then ran into trouble. I couldn’t figure out how to get our addresses into the file, so I turned to our resident design pro, Mrs. Cookie, for help. She took my design and put them in a Word document, which I then copy-and-pasted our addresses into. We talked about mail merge, but Mrs. Cookie decided it wouldn’t work, and I didn’t know how to do it, anyway. They were printed on Classic Linen in Baronial Ivory, text weight (24#).

We used a Xyron machine to make the labels sticky. I have to say that it was one of the best purchases I made. Getting the sticky backing on the labels was super easy, even if we did have to sacrifice a few labels to the craft gods. I will definitely be using my Xyron again. The label looks terribly crooked in that picture, and some of them were. I got to a point where I really didn’t care.

We live together. We don’t care what people think. But I wanted to stylize our names, so this is as close to a monogram as we got. I like it, though. It’ll show up in a couple of other places, too.

When it came to postage, we were lucky and it came in right at 59 cents. However, I can’t stand the current wedding stamps. So, I went on USPS.com and looked at what else was available. I quickly fell for Frank and Bette.

Aren’t they gorgeous? Since they were 42 cent stamps, and we had to make up the difference, we overpaid just a little bit and flung a couple of clocks on there. Mr. CC did the stamping, and I think he did a lovely job. Hopefully, the post office won’t mind that the big stamp is first and the little ones are last.

Next up, the final product!

I always save the best for last, eh?