Weddingbee Blog

So you saw our invitation suite here, and had nothing but wonderful things to say - we thank you much! At times, the process was difficult (lots of emails back and forth), but the end result was well worth it!

Now for some additional behind the scenes pics! First up, our rehearsal dinner invitations. They were included in the main invites of our grandparents, our bridal party, and our other ceremony participants.

They are very simple and understated, and I love them! Burger’s mom designed them on Wedding Paper Divas, and I think they are perfect.

What’s that huge green dot, you say? Ah, the drama of meat. Yes, meat.

You see, we’re Catholic, and we’re getting married during lent, which means no meat on Fridays. Originally, our priest had told us that we weren’t even allowed to serve meat at the rehearsal dinner (even though half of our guests are not Catholic). A few weeks ago, however, he contacted us to let us know that some of the higher-ups in the parish/diocese were giving us and our Catholic guests permission to be carnivorous, given that we make an additional sacrifice during the week of the wedding. Hence the big green dot. I had extra labels left over from our out of town boxes, and I put them to good use.

It reads: “For our Catholic guests, non-meat courses will be available at the rehearsal dinner. However, if you would like to eat meat, the diocese asks that you perform an additional sacrifice or make a donation to the charity of your choice in the week leading up to the wedding.”

I know, I know. It’s not normal. Some of you may even think it’s not polite, but it was at the request of our priest. And now at least our non-Catholic guests can eat meat if they want to!

OK, moving on. Our RSVP cards. Miss Spaniel recently did a post on how she discreetly numbered her cards for guest identification purposes. Take a close look at ours. Notice anything missing? That’s right - no line for people to write their names! I had read in quite a few places that people forget to write in their names unless you do it for them (which I was not going to do), and we had a million things we had to fit onto this card, so I scratched it. We have a line that says “We have reserved ___ places in your honor,” that we went through and filled in for people so that they know they are invited with a guest, for example.

To identify our guests, we put tiny numbers on the back of our cards which corresponded to a master list that Cheeseburger Mom has at home. This will also help because we have lots of people with duplicate names (Italian families are notorious for this), so this will help sort those people out, as well! I’m sure some people will be confused, but I’m not too worried about it - it’s covered from our end!

Now, stamps. I know I’m not the only one who gave some thought to stamps?! Our invite technically would have mailed for 61 cents… and apparently they make a 61 cent stamp (conveniently, it has a wedding cake on it), but I didn’t know that when I bought our postage. Plus, I wanted these specific stamps!

I love, love, love them! Why? I don’t know. Maybe its because you need both stamps to really get the whole picture (her hand ends up on his stamp if not)! To me, they are perfect .

Next, calligraphy. I bought a calligraphy set complete with different pens, nibs, and ink cartridges from Michaels about 6 months ago. I practiced when I bought it, then put it away. When I broke the kit out again, I decided I wasn’t going to attempt actual calligraphy. Instead, I just jazzed up my own handwriting by using a calligraphy pen! Here’s how I did it:

Our envelopes were ivory, so I knew I would be able to see through them fairly easily. I grabbed a piece of lined paper and darkened the lines with a sharpie:

I flipped the lined side so that it was facing the front of the envelope, and inserted it:

It’s difficult to appreciate in this picture, but hopefully you can see the lines showing through in this picture:

Then, I just went to town! My handwriting was by no means perfect, but I figured it was better than just writing with a regular pen, and it was certainly better than paying someone else to do it! However, after addressing 160 invitations, I understand why calligraphers charge so much - my hand and wrist took about a week to heal!

My only tip: start with the middle number of the zip code and work out from there… at least that line will be centered even if the other ones are not!

Finished product:

Here are some close-ups of the pen I used. It had a pretty small nib, which made the fine details of the font (haaaaa, what fine details?), doable. Also, I only used 2 ink cartridges for all of the envelopes, if you were wondering.

Finally, because I absolutely was not going to write my parents’ address 160 times, I purchased a desk embosser from PaperSource. It took about a week for it to be made and ship to us, but it only took about 15 minutes to emboss all the envelopes once it got there! Amazing! You do not have to push hard at all, and the impression is really beautiful.

A purposefully bad picture to protect the Cheeseburger parents’ privacy

Lastly, I made the trip to the post office. Officially, hand canceling costs 10 cents per piece of mail (at least that’s what I was told when I hand canceled my STDs), but the people my local post office have been awesome about letting me do it myself, free of charge!

I spent a good half hour stamping away, and I filled an entire mail bin!

It was really fun to finally get them in the mail to our guests! Also a lot of people came up and congratulated me on my wedding at the post office - it made my morning.

And now, it’s our guests’ turn to get them back to us! Phew!

Were you sooooo glad to be done with your invites?