Weddingbee Blog

Hello, all! Sorry for being ridiculously MIA lately. After our spontaneous move and all of the resulting craziness, Mr. Parfait’s work treated us to a much-needed vacation! We spent a week under the sun in Costa Rica and just flew in last night. When we walked into our condo, we suddenly remembered all that we had left behind. Namely, this:

The week before we left was extremely stressful and sprinkled with a few all-nighters. Our goal was to finish our invitations before we flew off, and it seemed like the closer we got to the finish line, the more obstacles appeared. To be honest, we really had the easy part—my cousin Julie designed every piece, The Aerialist Press printed them, and our families finalized the guest list. So what kept us up ’til the wee hours every night?

Rounding the corners, cutting the belly bands, and tying the ribbons… for starters. Here are a few pieces laid out to let the craft glue dry. You’ll see that every belly band is slightly different. I would’ve liked them to be uniform, but I’m so indecisive that I tried out something new for each one… until I had done 200 different bands.

You’d probably rather see the front. Here’s my favorite paper of the ones we used for the belly bands. It’s called Obonai White Feather and was just transparent enough to see some color through it.

We bought the envelopes separately, so there was plenty of stamp-affixing, labeling, and sealing; not to mention handwriting. Oh, the handwriting! We were out of time for a calligrapher and couldn’t find the cord to our printer. I wrote each address and return address on the outer envelopes. They looked more personal than professional, which I had no choice but to love. Instead of showing you a blurred image of someone’s address, I’ll show you how nice the cake stamps looked with our shimmery envelopes!

For the RSVP envelopes, I asked my cousin if she could design an address label. It was so last minute, but she whipped up six (SIX!) options for us! Talk about an over-achiever. I chose my favorite, printed them on a printer that shall not be identified, and oh-so-carefully slapped them on our little envelopes. Here they are pre-postage. I love the pink dots in the border!

And just when we were at the height of the cutting-scribbling-stuffing frenzy, another task got piled on our plate. We needed to create cards for the Skup Svatova, the pre-wedding party hosted by Mr. Parfait’s family. This part was such a process.

The night before our flight, we worked on our invites for 12 hours straight. We sealed the last envelope just as Mr. Parfait’s alarm went off, letting us know it was time to book it to the airport! We left a box of finished invites with our awesome doormen and felt the stress lift away as we flew off to our tropical vacation.

I’ll show you some delicious letterpressed details next, along with our entire suite!

What was the invitation-making process like for you? Did you DIY from beginning to end (How do you people do that?! I am amazed!) or just at the end like we did?