Weddingbee Blog

So, since I’m starting to get RSVPs back… this means I can finally reveal our invitations to the hive!!! Hooray! Yes, our babies have all left home…

To start with, we HAD to have letterpress. We made sure we budgeted enough for this - and when our budget looked a little tight, Mr. Ramen told me to just go for it, since it’s the one paper thing I’ve been dying to have since - well, forever. I am quite obsessed with paper. I have saved every single wedding invitation that I’ve received, even if I don’t like it. HAH! I like the look of paper, the touch of it, the smell of it. Letterpress ink has this mechanical smell which I LOOOOVE. And I’m totally keeping a set of our invites just for touching. MMM! Delicious texture - and that Crane Lettra paper?!?!? To die for!

Since Mr. Ramen is just flat-out amazing (have I mentioned how much I love that guy?!?!?), we decided to design them ourselves, and have them printed by Kristin at Twin Ravens. This saved us plenty of $$$, plus I got to be a big design brat and be super picky on things. To save some more $$$, we decided to go with a one-color press, although we did splurge a bit to letterpress the envelopes. To be completely honest… I wouldn’t recommend pressing the envelopes, because it doesn’t make THAT huge of a difference (at least to me), although it was nice. I requested that the invites were pressed deeply, because I love texture (hence the need for letterpress and my weird paper-touching neurosis).

So here’s a fun story about my bridal-induced wishy-washiness: we were making the FINAL revisions on our invite design, getting ready to send the PDF off to be pressed… and I changed my mind. I liked the design that Mr. Ramen had come up with, but it just didn’t feel right. And out of the loving sweet graciousness of his heart, Mr. Ramen slaved over coming up with a WHOLE NEW DESIGN in less than 12 hours. I am so glad I’m marrying this man! Anyways, the design concept is essentially a circle, which we enlarged/shrank to fit into different elements of our invite suite. And I topped it off with Goccoing the back of the RSVPs. But enough of my words - on to the pictures!!!

Standard inserts:

First, some blurry shots of our map - we printed these off of my home printer, 4 to a page, to save some $$, and also so we could add a little bit of color to our invites! I printed these on some cover weight paper from PaperSource in frost. The front side was the map and the back was the worded directions.

These took FOREVER to cut out. So I enlisted BM Dancing Queen and she got to work and cut them all out super fast!!! Look at that focused energy! I bribed her with candy.

Our compass on the map

Our little symbol for the reception….

and for the church!

And here comes the letterpress stuff…

These are business-sized cards that we used with our wedding website on them. Mr. Ramen transformed our little cartoons from our save-the-dates into us in our wedding clothes! (He still doesn’t really know what my dress looks like, so this was his interpretation of a wedding gown). It was our fun little way of tying the two things together. And here you can see almost the entire circle.

Our invites! I hate blurring out our pretty font (script - Luxus Brut, and sans serif - GeoSansLight for those of you who are interested). And I did buy that font - it was perfect and I couldn’t find anything free that was like it.

You can see part of the circle design on the left side of the invite. I think it adds some elegant whimsy.

You can see more invite photos here!

Our RSVP cards… I’ll have to upload a picture of the backs another time. I’m not sure if you can see it or not, but my fave detail was the little broken heart that indicates “regretfully declines”. Hehehehe!

So, I pretty much really don’t like pocketfolds. Not that I have anything against them personally, I guess… but I have this unique complex, and 97.89% of the wedding invitations that I’ve received in the last 9 years have all been pocketfolds. So we had to come up with something TOTALLY different. I was inspired by a MS invite shoot, where a single black thread/string was looped around the invite ever so elegantly…so for us, grey and light blue string came into play. A simple look. And uber time-consuming. But I liked the effect.

Here’s Ms. Martha’s version

And here’s our version! It’s not quite the same but good enough for me!

And I couldn’t have done it without Sister Ramen and Cousin Fishcake!!! The whole weekend they were in town, they were first working on my shower and then went straight into helping me with the invites. Dude, my family rocks.

And OF COURSE, we had a little help from our Friends. I am almost done with Season 10 of Friends - it’s my “background music” while I do wedding stuff. I started with Season 1 about… 1.5 months ago. Crazy!

A small part of the army of invitations, assembled and all lined up to go….

This was the remaining stack of invitation suites, all collated and ready to be personalized. Yup, we sent out about 212+ of these bad boys. Sigh! I had a long 2 nights ahead of me… luckily I had a little help from one of my school friends before I could get all of my babies out of the nest!

More invite details and tips to come…

How did you come up with your final invite design? Was it similar to your save-the-dates, or totally different?