Weddingbee Blog

When our invitations arrived from the printer and we finally had all the components to put them together, it pained me not to show the hive. But at the same time, Mr. Funnel Cake was flipping out a lil bit to get the Brazilian and Swiss invites out… so we slapped these Swiss babies together and sent the suckers out one day after getting them.

Now, with all invites out in the mail, it’s time to show these off to the hive!

Guests opened their bright red envelopes to reveal a subtle pattern that I like to think brings in a hint of Brazil to the otherwise very Swiss design. On each invite, we placed one of Mr. Funnel Cake’s carefully made stamps with our emblem.

The triangular flaps opened to reveal our mathematically awesome (KH)² equation, our date and a [hopefully] universally understood pictogram. Hand drawn to avoid any trilingual mess on the outside!

Opening the pictogram page revealed a smiling Miss and Mr. Funnel Cake to greet guests (and let people know who the heck the other is marrying!)

The first trifold flap sported our German invite text and another illustration, this time of the Grossmünster in Zürich, the first tower Mr. Funnel Cake and I climbed together.

All the way open, our English page was in the middle, with a mysterious Mount Rigi residing at the bottom of the page to signify our missed kiss on the mountaintop. On the right we laid the Portuguese text with an illustration of the Eiffel Tower, where Mr. Funnel Cake finally got it right and let me know he was in love.

Our postcards RSVPs were laid seamlessly over the opening photo on the American invites.

I really designed the postcards in a rush because of Mr. Funnel Cake’s anxiety to get the invites out, so we settled for a quick “Joyfully/Regretfully Attend/Decline” option to give it a little twist on the normal reply options. I probably would have thought about it longer had I the chance, but I’m happy with what we settled on.

…and the outside laid open flat you can see the pattern on the back was derived from our engagement photo.

I also managed to take some assembly photos before these went out in the mail. I was honestly surprised we got around 200 invites assembled and stuffed in a day!

Our stack of extras from the offset printing. See those ridges in the lower left photo? They are imperfections. I believe the print shop reprinted and die cut the invites to make up for their error. These extras don’t actually fold right, so they are kind of useless to me. (Not that we’re inviting four-jillion people and need more to send!)

To the left, our stack of postcards from Vistaprint. To the right, our growing stack of stamped invites.

I started a system of sticking the wax seals on the glue dots roll and peeling them off with the glue attached.

And closing the invites was a snap when I lined them up and ripped the adhesive strips off with machine-like speed. Go FC power!

To the left, our quickly half-designed address labels. I decided not to print them with a bleed that would need trimmed in order to get them done faster, but I did want to add the pattern to the label to tie the stickers in and spice up the otherwise boring labels. To the right, I did hand address a few invites that Mr. Funnel Cake wanted to hand out in person.

And all done. I compulsively organised the invites I was sending to my mother to post into four categories.

It actually saved us a ton of money to send the invites to my mother and have her send the US and Brazilian ones out from America. From Switzerland, invites to the US and Brazil costs around $5.03 whereas my mother bought stamps for Brazil for a little over $1 and to the US for around the same. So we saved almost $300 by shipping them in a box to her. Pretty good I must say.

Overall, I’m really happy with how the invites finished. In my opinion, they are sooo Swiss with their concise information on one invite sheet. No frills or fuss, but everything you need to know on one piece of paper!

When we’d dropped the Swiss invites in the mail and boxed up and posted the rest of the invites, Mr. Funnel Cake sighed the BIGGEST sigh of relief. Finally this stress was over.

Were you happy to finally get your invites in the mail?