Weddingbee Blog

I have a confession. I’ve had our invitations since October, and I haven’t shown them to you! And considering I love them SO much, it was a hard secret to keep. But I wanted them to be a surprise when everyone got them in the mail!

I could do an entire post filled with the hundreds of invitation suites we considered (read: disagreed on – let’s just say, Mr. Guinea Pig and I have completely different design aesthetics!)… but I will spare you all that and jump straight to the beautiful invitations we chose and both love!

(the Dogwood suite by Paisley Tree Press)

After browsing through said hundreds and hundreds of invitations, I had come to the conclusion that we had to have letterpress. Never mind the fact that we probably couldn’t afford it, and most people wouldn’t notice – I had fallen in love. So imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon a design that not only did I like, but Mr. Guinea Pig liked too, AND it was affordable! Jodi, the owner/letterpresser of Paisley Tree Press worked with me so we could get a 20% discount. Done!

And thus, the Guinea Pigs got their dream invites. Two-color, letterpressed on super thick (and I mean thick!) paper – check it out in the lining photo below. Yum. Plus, Jodi was absolutely amazing to work with, and I highly recommend her – she happily suffered through my 50 emails requesting details, samples, customizations, proofs with different fonts, proofs with the design moved a fraction of a millimeter, everything!

(Our invitation & the RSVP card – you can sort of see the indentation from the letterpressing! Sigh….)

We wanted to keep our invitation suite as simple as possible, without too many “frou frou add-ons” (said Mr. Guinea Pig), so we stuck to just the invite, an RSVP card, and one other piece of cardstock that had a map on one side and our website for travel/hotel information on the other side.

(The whole set, laid out. You can see (around the blurred out parts) the fauxligraphy I did for the envelopes!)

(The total package )

Now you can fully understand why I loved the envelope liners so much – check out how well they complement the invitation suite!

(The metallic flowers and our invite flowers! Here’s where you can see how thick the paper is – that’s just one invite!)

Mailing these was a bit of a challenge – the first post office told me they would be the regular $0.61 stamp. The second post office told me $1.39/envelope because they were too rigid and would have to be considered a package (what?!). Finally I went to the main post office in Baltimore and spoke with a senior postal worker who told me that in order to hand sort, I would just need to add $0.20 per envelope: the extra postage (in addition to the $0.61) is required for “rigid items” – otherwise they would go through the machine rollers, which probably would have bent/cracked/mangled the super thick paper.

In the end, the option that looked best aesthetically without paying a ridiculous amount of postage over what was required (he tried to convince me to use two 61 cent wedding cake stamps per invite!), were two 44 cent stamps — the Love stamps! I think they look great and are perfect together for a wedding invitation. And, despite the fact that I had to order the stamps online and wait 5 days for them because apparently no one in Baltimore stocks Love stamps, in the end everything turned out all right. I also discovered that when one post office tells you they can’t do something (ahem, like hand canceling), or that they will charge you $2.00 per envelope, just keep going to another one until you find someone who will let you do it yourself!

(Invitations: stuffed, addressed, stamped, and ready to be hand canceled/mailed!)

I mailed these on a Wednesday, and people who lived in and around Baltimore got them in the mail on Thursday. We got our first RSVP card back on Friday—talk about a quick turnaround! So far, my favorite RSVP has to be this one from my good friends in Baltimore. Of course it’s my married friend who completely understands not only to make the RSVP something fun to get back, but she got it back to us in record time!

(can you tell they’re excited to come?!)

What’s your favorite part about your invitations? Did you have any trouble deciding on a design with your fiance/e? Do you secretly hope someone frames your invitations too? ;)