Weddingbee Blog

One of the messes that resulted from the aftermath of our postponement was the invitations. Why was it a mess? Well, we had already ordered and received our invitations, and I cried when I found out they would no longer be of any use. (The actual invites couldn’t be used, but we found a way to salvage the envelopes…read on!)

From the get go, I knew a DIY invitation project wasn’t in the cards for me. I don’t own a Gocco and I couldn’t deal with the stress of designing (and possibly screwing up) our invitations. So, when it came time to figure out Wedding Invitations, Round Two, I was lost as to what I would do. This was the second time around, and our invitation budget was dwindling quickly.

Literally through luck, I was saved by the fabulous talents of Anne Rodriguez of The Paper Stylist. Anne is an amazingly creative graphic designer based out of Los Angeles. She helped me to find a vision for the invitations, and offered up her own design expertise throughout the process.

I provided her with these pictures for inspiration:

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The only other things I told Anne were to make the invitations “simple”, and I might have thrown around the word “traditional”. Here is what Anne created for our invitation suite:

The holders are described as “Gold Leaf Pochettes with Printed Scroll Work”.

Clean. Simple. Fabulous. I couldn’t have asked for more. And we used the same envelopes and RSVP envelopes from our original invitation suite. Anne made sure that everything fit and matched the original envelopes. All was not lost. In fact, I think we gained a lot with Invitations, Round Two.

Lastly, I addressed all 150 invitations myself. I used the good ol’ cursive I learned as the result of many painstaking hours spent practicing in handwriting workbooks during my Catholic school years. I simply could not justify professional calligraphy given our budget. And ultimately, I liked the personalization my handwriting brought to the envelopes.

Anyone else use a design company or an individual designer for your invitations? Were you happy with the outcome?