Weddingbee

This past week, I had the option of getting nothing done and blogging about how I was getting nothing done (probably would have been a bit repetitive and very boring), or not blogging and getting a lot done… so I chose the latter and now we have something to talk about (hopefully it’s still not boring :)).

As you may or may not remember, I ordered my invites from Wedding Paper Divas. Of course I drooled over letterpress for months, Contemplated Gocco, and then even started researching different homemade routes made of brown paper bags (thank goodness I didn’t dive into that mess!). But in the end, Wedding Paper Divas offered me the most affordable option for the time I wanted to put in.

After perusing through the different options multiple times, we chose the Dandelion style in Lime. We had always wanted green invitations and the addition of the dandelion gave the invite a whimsical and youthful touch. Plus I loved the look of the dandelion being blown across the RSVP and Thank- You cards.

Here they are stacked and out of the box:
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As our invites have now gone out, and our final guest count is about 100 people larger then what we were aiming for, a concern came up between both sides of our family. In Mr. H’s Hispanic culture, it is not unlikely for invited guests to bring along uninvited friends with them to the reception. At Hispanic parties, the more, the merrier.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to afford for this at our wedding, and the room for the reception is already nearing its max capacity. And although the invitation stated an “Adult Reception,” Mr. H’s mom is still worried that her family will not understand this and they will show up with their children.

After MUCH discussion (heated, at times), Mr. H decided that it would be best for us to send out an individual card to our guests in order to clarify that we unfortunately only have room for invited guests. He also wanted to be sure that the note was in both Spanish and English, so this is what we came up with last night:
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That’s right, we finally got our invitations off in the mail! I designed everything in Illustrator and had them letterpressed at Mercurio Brothers. When we received our initial RSVP cards, we were unhappy with the way they were printed, and the addresses on the RSVP envelopes were incorrect, but Mercurio Brothers quickly fixed the problem, reprinted the envelopes and reprinted the cards with a different design that I created all for no extra charge!

Since the colors of our wedding are solely black and white, we opted to keep the invitations simple, but incorporate our monogram into the pieces. We included a simple map with our website address for guests to access full directions and other details.

Last weekend, one of my bridesmaids was kind enough to spend her Friday night helping me stuff the envelopes, secure the belly bands and make sure that everything was organized. I had originally ordered our postage from Picture It, but accidentally ordered the wrong amount ($0.42 instead of $0.59). Since they don’t create postage faster then 8-10 days, I decided to order stamps with Zazzle. I ordered them on Monday and they were at our doorstep by Wednesday afternoon. Nice turnaround! The stamps we ordered from Picture It weren’t a complete loss, though, as we’ll be able to use them for thank you notes and another card we will be sending to some of our guests (more on that later).

Ok, I’ll stop explaining now and show you the pics!
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Before my Weddingbee obsession, I didn’t even think sending out rehearsal dinner invitations was necessary (which, I’ll admit, it probably isn’t), but now I’ll take any excuse I can get to spend a night being crafty and coming up with small wedding-related projects to keep me distracted from the recent crapfest we’ve been dealing with since Mr. Candy Corn’s car accident.  I decided to go with tea-length invitations, which we will print and put on chocolate brown cardstock with a bit of the border showing.

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Oh my lord. HALLELUJAH. I was SO glad when our invitations were done! When I finally put them in the mail, I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

I read about people making their own invitations but I can now tell you with absolute certainty that even if you read about other people’s whingeing, whining, and heartache surrounding their DIY wedding invitation project, you do not really know the pain until you do it yourself.

I’m hoping it’s like childbirth and the memory of the pain will erase itself once the reality of our beautiful newborn—er, wedding invites—sets in. (Still waiting for that to happen. It still feels too surreal.)

Here are some photos from the rest of the process and things that I wished I had known:

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I am super thrilled to announce that our much anticipated invitation suite is here!

*fanfare*

Not only that, but they are totally what we wanted and have exceeded our expectations. So here is the rundown. Right now, we are getting a Nikkah (in case you missed it, I gave a quick rundown of Pakistani/Islamic traditions) and so we decided to have the ceremony at a beautiful Masjid (Islamic House of Worship). The reception for the Nikkah will be at an Indian restaurant and we will be having a joint (bride family+groom family) mehndi party celebration the night before.

So, we were looking for an invitation for all three events enveloped into a cultural, yet modern suite. After looking around for a while, we settled on a relatively new kid on the scene, a recent graduate from an arts college here in Los Angeles. This was a tough call considering we wanted to impress and try to avoid any kind of unexpected surprises, which can sometimes happen when you don’t use seasoned experts in the wedding business. Anyhow, we bit the bullet and hired our mystery invitation vendor (who I will reveal soon) to create a hip modern, but cultural, invitation set.
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Our invitations, that is!

After months of obsessing over the design, then changing it, then finally reaching something I truly love and feel proud of, our invitations are in the hands of our guests. Which means not only is this wedding really happening, but it means that I can finally share the final product with the hive! Without further ado, our invitation suite, designed by yours truly (click on the photos to zoom in a bit):

The whole shebang, my pride and joy!

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At my job, I work with designers a lot and I know that when it comes to designing a piece of printed collateral, it’s a chicken-and-egg scenario… I don’t know what to write until I can see what they’re designing, and I they don’t know what to design until they see what I write.

Because I’m usually on the writing end though, when it came to our invitations, my instinct was to start with the words.

All we knew was that we didn’t want anything too formal because our destination wedding is going to be anything but. Plus, standard wedding etiquette sets out all sorts of rules for the way invitations should be worded if the wedding is paid for by the groom’s parents, the bride’s parents, both parents or no parents, but not for a destination wedding that was all about families meeting each other, having fun and making memories.

So I thought long and hard about what this wedding meant to us, and tried my best to convey it in just a few simple words. And this is what I came up with:

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Oh. My. God.

If I never see another X-Acto knife in my life, it’ll be too soon.

At least, that’s what I said immediately after Mr. Sea Breeze and I attacked Phase 2 of the DIY wedding invitation project: cutting the paper.

As you may recall, deciding on a design and buying the cardstock for these things was quite the ordeal. Once I realized that folds and pockets were gorgeous but complicated and finally settled on a simpler design, I hustled my butt around not just Vancouver but all over Southern Alberta (okay fine, one store in Red Deer and two in Calgary, but have you been to Calgary lately? It’s SPRAWLING) to get the right quantities of just the right paper at just the right price.

So imagine the look on my face when Mr. SB decided that cutting sheets one by one is for suckers.
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Once we had our wedding date, it was full steam ahead for our little wedding invite factory.

That’s right–after much research (including much Weddingbee reading), a couple of panicky trips to local stationery makers, and lot of grumbling from Mr Sea Breeze about the cost of things “that people are just going to chuck in the garbage,” I decided to make our own wedding invites.

It could have been worse. We could have sent out Evites - ’cause that’s what he was heavily campaigning for.

What a joker. (But apparently not the only groom out there with the same idea.)

So fine. Marriages are built on solid compromises, right? I’ll (painfully) retire my visions of dreamy letterpress invitations ($1,500 for 100 invites?!) if not one more word is said about Evites.

Done and done.
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