Weddingbee Blog

I like the vintagey feel the stamping gives the text.

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You know, Bee’s right. Nothing sets the tone of the wedding like the invitation. We just got the invitation to our friend’s Matt & Jenny’s wedding this fall and it’s gorgeous! The yellow actually looks brighter because I used flash but the leaves look hand painted almost.

I love Iomoi’s bold, modern graphic designs! They carry a great selection of custom invitations, stationery, address labels, paperweights, coasters and matches - it’s a one stop shop for wedding stationery and gifts.

(via veiledremarks)

Looking for a modern invitation? I just stumbled across Blue Skies and Daisies, which offers both wedding invitations and wedding Web sites. They do both custom and “ready to wear invites,” all in sleek styles. Looks like the run for about $7 a set. Here are some that I thought were cute:

INTERTWINED ZEAL INVITATION:

SWIRL + TWIRL:

CHERRY BLOSSOM:

My invitations! I am thrilled to say that at around 6:00 last night my invitation guru Shana called to let me know that my invites had arrived and were at the Wedding Library. By happy coincidence, Mr. Daisy and I were en route to a meeting a mere couple of blocks from the Library, with the umpteenth another officiant in our ongoing search, so planned to go there afterward and check out the goods.

And, oh my god, I love love love them. I want so desperately to post them here but they’re not going to the calligrapher until today and aren’t getting mailed out until after Labor Day. But I love them so much I almost want to marry *them*! (just kidding, Mr. Daisy!)

I chose letterpress invites as I am quasi-obsessed with letterpress, and thought to use Julie Holcomb Printers, which is a traditional letterpress that uses its own special blend of artisanal paper (just like Folger’s coffee, I’m sure!) that is theoretically ideal for letterpress. This printer prints on ecru or white paper only, which at first seemed limiting, but then when Mr. Daisy and my family were really keen on back-to-basics, I came to love. (I still really lust after my bridesmaid Sam’s red paper/white text invite of years ago. So vivid!)

But– I could not love my invites more. Sorry to be such a tease, but I will post them as soon as they are received by the masses.* Meantime, I will share some (very blurry due to my lack of camera prowess) shots of the contenders (both by Page Stationery):

Letterpress invite on composite paper (shown in one color, though we would have done two):

Response card:

My original choice, though I eventually deemed it too casual for our evening wedding:

Detail (loved the color and the modified fleur-de-lis border):

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* And I do mean masses. Each day, our list scarily multiplies like Gremlins in water. Not cool.

I met the women behind Three Designing Women at the National Stationery Show earlier this year, but forgot about their cool product until I saw them featured recently on another blog (sorry forget which one!).

Three Designing Women offers self-inking stamps that you can customize with addresses, monograms, names, sayings, etc. A return address stamp for instance, could be used on your save the dates, invitations, RSVP’s, and more. Best of all of course, you can continue to use them after the wedding.

They also offer monogram stamps in 6 different styles and every letter of the alphabet. Letters can be purchased separately and filled in. These could be used on everything from save the dates to menus to favor tags.

I love their stationery which is designed to be used with their stamps. Just stamp and voila - personalized stationery ready to go. This would even make a nice bridesmaid gift.

Available in fine stationery stores nationwide.

I absolutely love alt_meg8’s silkscreened poster invites she made… in her basement!

Cards, clips, and monograms from Paper-Source

Info sheet and hand-silk screened poster

Wonders of America stamps

See the rest of the pictures on her Flickr invitation set.

A few things I’ve learned while putting together my invitations. (Pictures are coming soon, I promise!)

• Check and recheck every name and address. I had to recheck a lot of my guests’ information. People move, break up, or start dating so it’s best to keep track.
• Make sure you have a set rule regarding “plus one.” I don’t have a hard and fast rule about this, and it’s made the process a bit difficult. As you know, my RSVP card says “____ of ____ will attend”, and I filled out the second blank. But without a rule regarding “plus ones,” I had to make a decision on the spot about who got to bring a guest and who didn’t.
• Do not assemble your invitations before you are ready to stuff the envelopes. I made the mistake of having Mr. Butterfly stuff the pocketfolds with all 3 of the inserts - RSVP, Information, and Rehearsal Dinner. The only problem is that not everyone gets the rehearsal dinner card. So as I was stuffing the envelopes, I had to remove this card based on who I was sending it to. Then we got all confused and had to re-open 9 invitations (after they were sealed) just to check that they didn’t get the rehearsal card.
  
• The most important rule: Do not seal the envelopes until right before they go out. We must have wasted 10 envelopes and 1 invitation due to making small mistakes. Luckily, my vendor sent over extras of everything, so we will hopefully have plenty left over.
  
• Oh yeah - get extras of everything!

You wouldn’t believe the amount of time it’s taken to pull this together. But, I gave my first invitation (by hand) to my MOH last week, and she was very impressed. The extra tape for my tape guns are coming today, so I will be able to finish them off tonight and have it ready to go out tomorrow. Yay! It’s almost over!

Tomorrow my mother, future MIL and fiance are going to take a look and possibly decide on invitations. You’re probably wondering where I, or the bride-to-be, am in the previous sentence. I won’t be going with them because I have work. So I’m leaving the decision to my fiance and our mothers.

Is this a bad idea?

I trust the three of them will make the right decision. The one thing I am a bit worried about is my mom. She mentioned how she wanted to include the birth order of my fiance and I on the invitations, like it would on a traditional Korean invitation. I told her it really is unnecessary, and that the parents’ names and ours would be fine. I don’t even know how you would word something like that in English without it looking ridiculous and keeping the invitation to one page. But my mother feels strongly about it. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that someone tells her there won’t be enough room on the actual invitation.

Is invitation shopping that difficult? Well for me it is. I think I have literally looked at everything online and have even gone into some print shops.

Last week we went with a friend of ours to a print shop and when they came up with a estimate for 80 invitations, it was $1600. That didn’t even include rvsp cards, direction/map cards and whatever inserts we needed. So that’s not an option at all.

But the good news is that we found a bunch of sites online that sell very cheap invitations that don’t look bad at all. The only thing is, when I had the samples in my hand they were a bit on the plain side. But then I figure with the amount that I’m saving in cost, I can use more money on embellishing. I know for sure I would add ribbon and some sort of sealing for the envelope. I promise to show you girls once I decide which invites, and the finished product as soon as I get them done.

Where are you getting your invites from? Online, print shop or diy… or both?

Whatever you ladies choose to do: best of luck to you!

Amy had a great experience working with her invitation company A Day in May and loved her letterpress wedding invitations so much, she sent us pictures!

This is my favorite part - check out the pictures of the cow, fish and carrot on the RSVP card to indicate beef, fish, or vegetarian. Very cute!

Amy getting married this September in the Bay Area, and she has a lovely Knot bio, so be sure to check it out.

I wanted to thank Miss Grasshopper for mentioning Peter Kruty Editions for doing her letterpressed invitations. It’s sort of a long story, but essentially, I had my invitations printed by a letterpress printer that came highly recommended. Well he botched the job and refused to redo it!

I had one month to research and requote my invitations with another letterpress printer. My design (I’m a grahic designer) was a bit complicated and most print shops couldn’t handle the it. Well, as soon as I saw Miss Grasshopper’s invites and read how pleased she was, I emailed Kat at PKE immediately.

They were able to print the job to perfection! If it weren’t for Miss Grasshopper, I would have never discovered the greatness that is PKE!

thanks again!!
daisy028

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Daisy was kind enough to share her beautiful 7 page invitation with us that included - the invitation, reception card, map, hotel information, history of the cathedral, history of the reception venue, and a perforated RSVP postcard.

Check out the rest of her invitation pics here.

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Do you have fabulous invitations you’d like to share? Send them to stories@weddingbee.com!

…and no progress made! We spent our 5 days upstate blissfully ignoring all those pesky caterer issues and not actually making a single call or even measuring the width of the area where we could put the tent! Oh well! I’m sure I’ll regret that soon, but I just couldn’t make myself do anything but relax up there, so it’s all good.

On to actual wedding-related items….

How do we feel about designated place settings? Presumably if you’re having a straight-up sit down served dinner, you would have to have them (right?). But for a buffet, are they necessary/nice to have/a little silly?

I’ll admit that my main reason for wondering about this is that we weren’t expecting to assign seats, but now I keep seeing great place card ideas and I totally want some of my own! But I think they’d be a bit out of place for our fairly informal buffet. We’ll have them for the Chinese banquet we’re having in the city after the wedding, but a lot of my cute ideas (toothpicks with names stuck into an apple is my current favorite) won’t seem as a propos at a Chinese restaurant…

At other wedding forums I’ve been to, people generally get VERY heated over the seated dinner vs. buffet, and seat assignments vs. no seat assignments issues, which leads me to think that perhaps it’s largely a regional issue (?)

That said…it’s poll time!

I’m stationery-challenged.

When my mock-up invitation came in, I saw the RSVP card with my address printed on the back.

Front

Back

So I thought the printed address on the back was an example of what the RSVP envelope would look like. It is a mock-up, so I just figured that she didn’t put in all of the pieces.

Last night, as I was going through the different pieces of the invitation, I realized that I did not have any RSVP envelopes. So I emailed Adrienne from Custom Programs and asked her to send it out pronto. She writes me back within 3 minutes to tell me that the RSVP’s are actually post cards.

Duh~. Like I said, I’m stationery-challenged.

Anyway, I absolutely love the idea of a postcard RSVP! I know people are horrible about returning RSVP’s to begin with, especially Koreans, so I’m hoping this will make it at least that much more convenient. Just fill it out and drop it in! (Come to think of it, it’s not that much more easier than a regular RSVP, huh?)

Now my only concern is that people won’t flip it over to see that its a postcard.

My invitations came yesterday! Woohooooo~!

Of course being the neurotic person that I am, I had to get started right away on putting those babies together! I have plenty of pictures, but I won’t be posting them until after these babies go out. Sorry.

Anyway, to put these things together yourself, you need a good glue gun or a tape gun. My vendor recommends using these:

Scotch ATG Tape Gun

Koyuko Tape Dispenser

I put together 10 invitations last night, and these work wonderfully! I used the big one for the invitation and the backing layer panels, and then the small gun for the outside seals.

So all of you DIY’ers out there, I highly suggest getting both of these guns for your crafts. They work really well!