Weddingbee Blog

Hello, bees! I know, I know… it’s been kind of quiet on the French Fry front lately, and for that I am sorry. But! I do not come to you with just a sorry apology — oh, no. I come to you with a post full of pictures. Not just any kind of pictures… pictures of our invitations!

Yep, the wedding paper porn is here, my friends. (Go ahead and scroll down to look at them before reading the rest of this…you know you want to.) I wanted to wait until our invitations were mailed before posting them on the ‘bee. To say that I love our invitations is just a bit of an understatement. I pink puffy heart them — and yes, a pink puffy heart is apropos, considering that if you don’t like the color pink, you’ll most likely hate my invitations. OK, “hate” is a rather strong word… but you’ll probably dislike them heartily, because well… they’re Pink. With a capital P.

The absolutely lovely and wonderfully talented Mrs. Gloss of Fourth & Folded designed our invitation suite from start to finish — and she’s currently working on some other paper products for us! She’s seriously amazing — and I never, in a million years, could have hoped our invitations would look this good. So a huge thank you goes out to Mrs. Gloss!

Enough words — you’re here for the pictures.

(Note: all pictures in this post were taken by yours truly.)

Ohh, what’s this? A beautiful wedding invitation in a stunning black envelope? (Additional note: we used wrap-around labels, but I didn’t take pictures until the invites were sent out and didn’t want to print an entire sheet of them for this, so just imagine the backside of a wrap around label here, mmmkay? kthanksbye.)

Our names, along with our candy motif, are featured on the inside of the envelope liner. I hope people didn’t use letter openers on these, because I *really* wanted them to see this part. I loved our liners!

Behold — our candy edged belly bands! Letmetellyou…Mr. FF is super proud of these belly bands — he suggested using “some type of strip of paper to hold everything together.” He thinks that he came up with the entire belly band concept himself. I used a Martha Stewart edge punch that I found around Valentine’s day to make the belly bands (and actually wore it out and had to order another one from Amazon!).

Gratuitous belly-band/paper shot.

Flipping the entire thing over, our guests will see our enclosures. We enclosed a reception card, a directions/accommodations card, and a RSVP card and envelope for each invitation. I know that traditionally, these items are placed on top of the invitation, but I loved the fronts of our invites so much that I didn’t want to cover them up any more than the belly-band already did.

Speaking of the fronts of our invitations, here they are! Each invitation was hand-fed (by moi) through the printer for the front of the invitation, and then again through the printer to print the strip motif on the back of the invitation.

The printer and I got to be very close during this process. And by “close” I mean I may have called it a few names.

Our reception cards (front and back). We’ve decided to keep our reception “adults only” but didn’t really know how to word it correctly. Every etiquette book said that it was poor etiquette to print “adults only” on the invitation, and we went back and forth over this for quite some time. In the end, we threw etiquette to the wind in favor of being clear and concise about what’s going on.

Our reception/directions card (printed double-sided).
The candy motif is used here, too — love it.

Our RSVP card and envelope. (By the way, we used Paper Source papers & envelopes for everything, just in case you’re wondering.) I decided to nix calligraphy and knew that my handwriting is far too atrocious for wedding invitations, so I hand-fed the envelopes through my printer to print my address onto each one.

Our RSVP cards (front and back). We opted to indicate the number of seats allotted for each guest. This goes back to our whole “clear and concise” concept. We’ve actually gotten a lot of compliments on our RSVP cards because of our somewhat unique RSVP options. They read:

• Accepts with pleasure!
• Accepts with the sure and certain knowledge of making a spectacle of myself on the dance floor.
• Declines with regret.
• Declines with regret because I’d really like to see others doing the chicken dance and generally looking foolish.

I am so happy that we ended up semi-DIYing our invitations and I am thrilled with the way they turned out! I knew that if I attempted to design something myself, I never would have been happy with the results – I’m just not that skilled with design, and people probably would have ended up receiving Post-It notes with the details on them. Semi-DIY was definitely the best route for us, because I had the time and patience to print them, but just needed help with the design aspect. The best part of sending out our invitations? Checking the mail every day to see how many RSVP’s we’ve gotten back!

Did you completely DIY your invitations, semi-DIY your invitations, or have them printed professionally? If you could, would you go back and do it another way?