Weddingbee Blog

Like many Bees before me, plain ol’ paper wasn’t gonna cut it for our invitations. I wanted something with texture and weight, darnit!

For our save the dates, I used a company called The Paper Mill Store to purchase my paper. I was very pleased with the quality and color of the paper we received, but still felt like I needed something more for the invites.

Enter LCI Paper. LCI is fantastic because you can order samples of their paper to see which you like best! I ordered 6 different kinds of cardstock samples, ranging from smooth cardstock to a really cool, heavy wood grain paper.

It was super helpful to have these samples since I knew I wanted something special, but just didn’t know exactly what it was yet. I also wanted to make sure that Kinko’s could print on whatever I ended up buying, that way I wasn’t stuck with paper that was too thick or too textured.

Unfortunately, the wood grain paper I loved SO much proved to be too textured to print on:

The “safe” samples of thinner, smoother cardstock I ordered were just fine, but didn’t have the “oomph” I was looking for.

(The blurred top and bottom is due to a shallow focus with the camera, not the printing)

We narrowed our choices down to the following: A ridged, textured paper that looked fantastic when printed on that was very reasonably priced, and a shimmery iridescent paper that feels more like fabric than paper, and of course, is more than double the price of the ridged paper.

This is the ridged paper

Invitation Paper Sheen from Mandy Weger on Vimeo.

And this is me trying to portray the sheen of the iridescent paper via my Flip Video.

Mr. Socks and I of course loved the paper that was the most expensive. Isn’t that the way it always works?? We decided to go for it since the texture, weight, and shimmer to the paper were so different and unexpected—I just imagine our guests opening up the envelopes and being awed by this strange paper that doesn’t even feel or look like paper! Oh, I wish you guys could see it in person! In fact, you should order a sample of this paper from LCI just to know what I’m talking about. Seriously.

So once we ordered the paper for our invitation suite, it was time to figure out our envelopes. The matching envelopes sold at LCI are only available in square envelopes and are about a billion dollars for 100. A billion dollars in envelopes + a billion dollars in extra shipping for square, heavy envelopes=Miss Socks pouting over why things have to be so expensive in the wedding world.

The next natural place for me to turn to? My beloved PaperSource of course! We went to the store in Princeton, picked out Persimmon A6 envelopes for the invites and shimmery copper A2 envelopes for the RSVP/return envelopes.

One pic with flash on to see the sparkle, one without flash to see a more true representation of color.

I also picked up invisible pens to number our RSVPs:

Ahh, PaperSource… they just have everything a girl could want.

Next up… I’ll reveal our invites in their entirety!

Did you experiment with papers for your invites? Did you have to get your paper and envelopes at different places?