The Paper Goods

Now that I have sent out all the invitations, I can show them to you guys! I didn't want anyone to get a peek at them prior to my trip to the post office...

All along I had planned to do my own invitations which I knew would be an easy task but very time consuming. I started designing them back in November when we got engaged and keeping with the theme of the wedding...rustic simple elegance was the look I was going for. I wanted to incorporate orange into it seeing as that was the main color of the wedding but I also wanted it to have the simpleness while maintaining an elegant feel. I hope that I kept with that in the end result.

For those of you who do want to design their own invitations, I would suggest to start early. I would say I put about 40 hours + in the design part alone, mostly because I am a perfectionist and I would design, close the program and come back to it a little later and redo what I had done before. I had 3 seperate pieces to work on: the invitations, the RSVP cards, and the "more info" cards. Once I was set on the invitation design it was fairly easy to finish the rest.

I ordered my envelopes from Cards and Pockets which I found to be reasonable in price and their quality of paper was amazing. I will say in hindsight I should have ordered samples of the colors because I made the mistake by ordering the wrong color of gold the first time. But they were easy to return and I just bought the other color that I was looking at....it turned out to be exactly what I was going for. I used the 18K gold color and then the Sparkling Merlot for the RSVP cards.

The next step was inputing all the addresses in an excel spreadsheet which I have mentioned in previous posts. I then addressed all the envelopes, which I had done about a month before cutting, stuffing, and stamping the envelopes . Doing that made everything a lot easier by the way. Like I said, start early and take your time with all the stuff. I don't think I really stressed at all because I did that.

The paper that I chose for the invitations was actually sketch pad paper...it was fairly inexpensive and really gave the old antique-ish rustic feel in the end. Because it is sketching paper, it was bigger than the standard 8.5 x 11 paper. I had to cut it all done (which took tons of time) and then once I printed out the invites, I had to cut again. I would say that this took up the majority of the time.

Everything was printed and ready to go so at that point, I was ready to assemble. I had my stamps, the envelopes, each part of the invites and a lot of DVR to catch up on :)

By the way, a little word of advice to all my fellow brides. In your spreadsheet, make a column where you number each guest. Then on the back side of your RSVP envelopes, number them so that way if you have guests who forget to put their names on the cards, you will be able to indicate who is coming. This also took up some time but I think it is worth it.

**Notice the polar bear stamps? Not my favorite.....

Onto the post office I go! (there was a man outside talking on his phone, and I am pretty sure he thought I was a weirdo for taking this picture. I wanted to tell him it was for blogging purposes, however, I have a feeling, he wouldn't understand).

**Confession: I gave the lady my box of envelopes and got super emotional...this probably doesn't surprise those who know me, but it caught me off guard.**

So my box that was once full of 100 envelopes all the sudden became this:

By the way, i managed to do all this and still only have to pay $0.44 for the stamps! YAY!