Weddingbee

It’s usually pretty evident you’re getting old when almost every weekend you’re attending a wedding or a baby shower. It seems like this summer I’ve spent more money on baby burp cloths and wedding gifts than… gasp… gas! Believe it. But there’s one thing I refuse to spend on with my hard earned cash. Between the Gocco, paper cutters, stencils and other crap I’ve accumulated, why not just make my own cards?
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The invites went out a little over a month ago and the deadline had recently passed, so the wonderful experience of running to the mailbox is almost at its end. Sad. I thought I would relive it by sharing the invitations with you.

My first plan was to make the invitations myself. After several cracks at Photoshop and a slew of other handmade invites and cards, I threw that idea out the window. I had also spent countless hours drooling over letterpress invitations on the millions of wedding blogs that I read and had developed an obsession. Then I found Margot of Atelier Isabey. Her work was just what I had in mind, and I could customize it to be exactly what I wanted, and she was as sweet as could be. I was still able to sneak in a little DIY, but they are mostly a whole lotta genius from Margot. I asked for vintage garden—that is definitely what we got. I love, love, love, love them.

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Last year, when we were preparing our Out of Town bags for guests, we knew that water bottles would be an essential ingredient to include. Yet, since it’s me, there was no way the water was getting into people’s hands without some sort of fun intervention!

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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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You probably want the wedding whirlwind recap to be over as much as I wanted the day to be over while it was happening. I was exhausted by this point, and not interested in the least in the idea of dragging myself over to Paper Source. You see, I’m what you might call a paper virgin.

Paper Source does know how to cater to an audience. This paper and ribbon wedding dress on display perked me up a little bit.

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FREe FoNts aRe Fun

When it comes to computers and design, I must admit my experience is limited to college papers and projects. Sure I’ve used Powerpoint and Photoshop, but our computer has very few font options. I still remember typing papers and using Courier font to make the document longer… pathetic. Because we didn’t want our invites and STDs to be in Times New Roman, I had to explore our options.

I knew there had to be sites that provided free fonts, but I didn’t want to download a potential virus or open up our computer to any strangers. I thought I should investigate the world of free fonts a little!

First off, when you Google “free fonts” there are a TON of results that come up. Obviously there are many duplicate fonts out there in the free world, so no one site is really that much better than another, but there are some that are great if you know what font you are looking for.
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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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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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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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