Weddingbee Blog

When it came to figuring out   wedding invitations, I was at a complete loss as to what to do. First things first, I am a stationery nut. I worked part-time in a scrapbooking store while in my first year of university, and I’m not kidding you when I say that I still, to this day, have a massive stash of craft goodies in my cupboard. I don’t scrapbook much these days (no time!) but man, I have a random little collection of cute papers and stickers that the 17 year old Miss Jaguar really, really loved.

At first, I figured I would save some money and go down the DIY-route: buy some nice cardstock, get busy with the printing and make ‘em pretty all by myself… but then, I ran out of steam. By the time I bought the supplies I would need to make them, plus the time I would’ve needed to run them through our ancient (and very temperamental) printer, it just wouldn’t have been as practical or as cheap as I’d have liked. My next option was to print some out through Vistaprint or Zazzle, but when I worked out the price of what I’d need for a set of 80 invitations (let alone response cards), the price was still higher than I expected.

I wasn’t even going to bother researching letterpress invitations, because I knew it was completely and utterly out of our budget. At this point though, I was getting desperate.

I’m not going to come right out and tell you how many hours I spent googling ‘budget letterpress invitations’ because it’s downright embarrassing, but I eventually found that one company kept on popping up: Twin Ravens Press. Funnily enough, it wasn’t until after making contact with Kristin that I realised she was the artist behind many a bee’s invitation suites: Mrs Turtle, Mrs Cherry Pie, Mrs Hermit Crab, Mrs Bear Cub and Miss Panther! (Ladies, have I forgotten anyone?)

Kristin’s pricing was very affordable, and it worked for me since we’re only having a fairly small wedding—I only needed 80 invitations and envelopes. Now keep in mind that when I say affordable, I mean affordable for letterpress: even shipping them from the USA to Australia was less than what I was being quoted to ship them within the country. To keep costs down, I didn’t order a full suite and stuck with just the basics: invitations with matching envelopes and small response cards and envelopes.

Okay, enough with the blathering: let’s get to the good stuff. Opening the parcel was like Christmas morning:   so many lovely things, all wrapped up beautifully and ready to swoon over.

I desperately wanted envelope liners, but I couldn’t afford to add those on to the order itself, so Kristin offered to cut them for me, provided that I pay for the paper needed and assemble them myself. That worked out perfectly! To match our grey, green and ivory theme, I chose a dark grey paper. It’s hard to see here, but it’s the most lovely, shimmery metallic shade.

My job assembling the liners didn’t take long: all I needed to do was glue the liners onto the envelopes, tie the invitations and the response cards together, and slide ‘em in. Here’s what the liners looked like:

What did take a long time, was hand-writing everything. You see, I wasn’t quite sure how to get around the whole ‘no kids’ or ‘and guest’ dilemma, since I didn’t want to spoil the wording on the invitations. And while my family has been great at spreading the word about those things, I didn’t want to take any chances with extra guests turning up on the big day, so I did the only thing I could come up with: I labelled the ‘names’ section on our response cards. It may be against etiquette, but it saves me having extra names popping up on the cards and questions being asked: or at least, I hope it will. Time will tell.

As well as that, I hand-wrote all of our guest addresses… as best I could. I tried to be neat, and I tried to make them each look fairly similar, but you know, I’m human. And soon after I began, the practical part of me kept on screaming that the envelopes were just going to be ripped open - what’s inside is more important! That didn’t stop me from doing my best to write neatly, though. (Aaah! The blur kills me.)

Taking a closer look… oh my goodness, we lucked out on the stamps. I made a special trip to our post office to ask them what kind of ‘weddingy’ stamps they had, and the lady was really helpful: she went digging through previous runs of stamps to try and find something nice for me. We got all excited when she found a ‘LOVE’ themed box, only it was empty and storing different ones…and for a while there, the best she could find were “Islands,” until all of a sudden, BAM. She found flowers. The most lovely flowers around. Check ‘em out!

As for the final invitations? Well, you’ll have to hold out for those, I’m afraid! (Sorry! I couldn’t resist… but they’re just so lovely, they totally deserve their own post.)