Weddingbee Blog

Sorry I’ve been too busy to post much lately, but we FINALLY put our save the dates in the mail last Monday, and “we received them!”s have been slowly trickling in!!! It is seriously the most exciting thing EVER! I’m pretty sure I will physically explode when we get RSVPs for our actual invitations next year, because I’m already pretty close!!

The reason we kept our finished save the dates all addressed and stamped sitting in a bag on the floor for…um…nearly three weeks…is that we linked to our wedding website on the save the date and had the sudden revelation that the site just wasn’t “fun” enough! So we decided to fix it up, add pictures and stories, and not send out the save the dates until the website was ready, since we guessed most people would look at it once when they got the save the date, and then not again until they needed real practical details around wedding time.

How much energy are you putting into your wedding website (if you’re having one)? Do you think people (who aren’t wedding obsessed ) really spend time looking at them??

But onto what you’re actually here for…..the Save The Dates! We DIY’ed the entire thing, from all the text to stamping, cutting, gluing, hole punching, and tying, so (un)fortunately for you, there are lots of in-progress photos to scroll through before you get to see the finished product!

First, we (well, I) stamped this lovely double happiness (from paper-source) in red Color Box ink directly on the center of each front card.
Note how bored our cat looks with this process.

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We’re doing so many other things in a somewhat nontraditional way (dessert buffet, Swarovski crystal bouquets, secular ceremony) that it only makes sense to have a guestbook that’s a little bit offbeat as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with the usual sprial-bound, leather covered notebook — so many of them are absolutely gorgeous! But there are many other alternatives.

Probably my favorite idea is the guestbook scroll.

This one is gorgeous, but a bit pricey–it starts at $60 for a computer-generated one:
Compassionate Expressions

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Greenbeanbaby creates whimisical pieces of art entirely out of bits of paper. She sells handmade bridal shower invitations at her etsy shop, but also does some custom invitation work.

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I finally got my save the dates in from Tag and Company. This particular style, the one we chose, is called “luxe.”

They’re really great quality and relatively cheap too - only $3 per invite/save the date. This company specializes in save the dates, but they’re perfectly willing to change the wording to make it into a formal wedding invitation for free. They’re great and come in really fast too!

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Mr. Caterpillar and I attended the Sapuquezes’ wedding in mid August. By the end of August, we had a thank you note filled with lovely handwriting and heartfelt sentiments. Mr. Caterpillar and I are not the Sapuquezes. We have yet to write a single thank you note.

I’m tempted to blame our lack of thank you notes on our current homelessness, but I’m pretty sure more organized people would have just found a Starbucks in which to sit and write, throwing fear of artic air conditioning and repetitive stress injury to the wind. I suppose that the real problem is just not knowing where to start.

The Morning News has a great primer by Leslie Harpold, which breaks note writing into these steps:

1. Greet the Giver
2. Express Your Gratitude
3. Discuss Use
4. Mention the Past, Allude to the Future
5. Grace
6. Regards

Very useful.

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I just got Miss Butterfly’s shower invite in the mail! (Sorry it’s a bit wrinkled - I have a small mailbox.)

When Miss Butterfly’s MOH found out I was posting it on weddingbee, she said, ” I should have taken more time and made it even better had I known it was about to be displayed!”

If I’m invited to anything wedding related, know that pictures - and plenty of them - will be taken.

As much as I hate to use the phrase “B-List Guests,” I think it’s sometimes inevitable that we have them. It’s especially unavoidable if you have parents who want to send out invitations to certain guests just in case they want to come - mostly to be polite and to announce that I was getting married. I gave my mom 24 “seats” and only 10 are coming - maybe 9. So now my guest count is all off and I’m barely making my 85 minimum guarantee.

My problem is not so much that I have B-List guests, but that I only ordered 60 full invitations. I have extras of just the invitation layer, but I’m out of the backing layers and pocketfolds. Tonight after work, I will be at Kate’s Paperie looking for these items, or I will be stuck sending out the incomplete versions - just the invitations and the RSVP card with tissue paper.

Tip 1: Order much more invitations than you think you need.

Speaking of RSVP cards…

I feel bad about inviting the B-List people because my reply card says to respond by October 1, which is this Sunday. Any person would be able to figure out that they were on the B-List. I’m racking my brain to see if there is a tactful way to give these people their invitations while letting them know that they are “second-choice”. I can just imagine: “Hi, here are your invites. Sorry that they are late, but we didn’t think we would be inviting you.”

Had I known that I was going to end up with B-List guests, I would have had some reply cards printed with a later date.

Tip 2: If you expect to have a B-List, I would highly suggest getting two sets of reply cards, one set with a slightly later due date.

Are you having any B-List people at your wedding? If so, how did you end up inviting them?

The Guestbook Store allows you to customize guestbook pages into a fun, interactive, scrapbook-like layout. You can choose specific themes like wedding or bridal shower, pick a fabric or leather cover, then select the number of pages you want. You can even add special pages for displaying invitations, recording gift logs, or blank create-your-own pages.

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I don’t know if I’m really going to call it “The Story of Us” but it seems like a good starting point. Now that my menus are done, the other side of the tented cards will be a short timeline.

We originally wanted to write a personal story about how we met, or how our relationship progressed, or something to that effect. However, as I was attempting to write our story, I discovered that I suck at writing stories. Mr. Butterfly, on the other hand, is great at them. Unfortunately, we honestly could not think of any story to tell. So we agreed on the timeline idea.

I don’t have any of the pictures yet, but this is the general idea.

{baby picture of Mr. Butterfly}
5/xx/197x
Mr. Butterfly is born

{baby picture of Ms. Butterfly}
6/xx/197x
Ms. Butterfly is born

{picture of Mr. and Ms. Butterfly together}
3/xx/2003
Mr. and Ms. Butterfly meet

{picture of my engagement ring}
2/3/2006
Mr. Butterfly proposes!! Ms. Butterfly says Yes!

{image of wedding bells or wedding rings}
11/xx/2006
Mr. and Ms. Butterfly tie the knot!

Mr. and Mrs. Butterfly’s honeymoon destination: 3 nights in Puerto Rico at the Ritz, and 4 nights in Cap Juluca in Anguilla.

I don’t know if I will have room for the honeymoon destination, but I thought it might be cute to put it in there because everyone will be asking anyway. What do you think?

Yes, two weeks-ish ago, my invitations made their journey out into the world (or more specifically, to our guests since sociable as I am, I’m still capping my guest list at 300– sorry, world!). Since they were pretty simple–an invitation card, a reception card, a response card + envelope–it was not the most difficult thing for me to assemble them. (Not that such a trivial fact hampered me in my quest to make *everything* wedding-related into a complicated procedure, believe you me.)

After making him wash his hands multiple times (with soap!!) prior to any opportunity to touch the invites, I immediately relegated Mr. Daisy to stamp duty. Shortly thereafter, I benched him as I decided his stamps were not the exact perfect distance from the corner of the envelope (and weren’t exactly straight either, if I’m being honest. Which I am. Those stamps were crooked!)

Here is what my dining room table looked like as I assembled the goods:

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Between programs, menus, personal story, and table escort cards, I found menus to be the easiest to do. Why? My venue already provided the descriptions of the food, and Adrienne from Custom Programs designed the rest!

Here is what I am serving and what my menu looks like. Imagine that it’s on one side of a tent card, where the menu itself is ecru cardstock and the backing is the same orange color that I used in my invitations.

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We blogged about how cool concert ticket invitations would be a couple weeks ago, and Bliss Weddings Market is now offering them!

You can use them as save the dates, wedding invitations, bridal shower invites, bachelorette party invites, and more. The tickets measure 5 1/2″ W x 2″ H, and are available in red, blue, yellow, green, purple, orange, and pink. They also come with matching envelopes.

The best part? They’re only $12.99 for 10! Love it!

Full disclosure - Bliss Weddings Market advertises on weddingbee, but we would never blog about something unless we really thought it was cool! In fact, I’ve purchased things from them in the past for my wedding and my brother’s wedding too ;).

I admit it. I’m an invitation addict. How will I ever choose from all the millions of gorgeous papers and designs and fonts and colors and and and…? My newest invitation crush is the work of the invitation duo, Wiley Valentine. Their designs unique and have a bit of an old-word charm to them.

I love the lacy feel of the “Jessica” invitations and the detail around the return address is awesome– kind of like the frame on an old mirror.

Also, how cool is the art deco style of the “Elizabeth” invitations!?

I just saw this today and thought it could be a very cute addition to save the dates. MOO.com makes minicards with your own pictures on the front. They are about half the size of a regular business card and you can fit about 5-6 lines of text on the back. But they only cost $20 for 100 of them, plus, you can print a different photo on each one! With a cute pic of the couple or wedding location, they are sure to stay on the fridge or in a wallet for a long time.

And the best part of all is that Flickr Pro members can get 10 free cards (FREE free, no shipping, no tax!). I just ordered mine, and I can’t wait to see how they turn out! It looks like at this point, you need to be a Flickr member and have the pictures you want to use uploaded onto Flickr, but the basic membership is free and it’s a good service regardless.

Keep up the great work!
Shannon
AKA Shanbrite2

Hi Weddingbee,

I just wanted to share with you my wedding invitations that I love! The pictures don’t do them full justice to how lovely they are. My fiance and I had very specific ideas about what we wanted our invites to look like, and so we went the custom route. The best part was we were able to incorporate so much of our family into the invitations. The cherry blossoms on the front of the pocketfold and the interior were painted by my father, and the map was drawn by my fiance’s brother.

We worked with Yvonne from Double Happiness Creations and could not be more thrilled with the results. It was a great experience and I highly highly recommend her. She listened to all our ideas, had many great suggestions of her own, and, most importantly, was willing to do a million different drafts to give us all the options.

Enjoy!
Christina

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