The Invitations Revealed

Here they are, making their Weddingbee premiere...

(personal photo)

Some of you may have seen my previous post about cards I made. I DO plan to handmake thank you cards and gift card holders for our bridal party and helpers. However, as much as I would've loved to handcraft 250 invitations, I realized I just wouldn't have the time to. We do plan to do some DIY items for our wedding, but invitations weren't one of them.

So as I previously posted, we set off on our invitation journey.  Mr. Lace and I didn't want to kill a million trees for our invitations and we were looking for a way to save money since our venue and catering were so expensive.  We decided we wanted to do everything online and only send a one card invitation to our friends and family. Since we were already doing something untraditional, we decided to do something a little different with our invitation.  Our graphic designer was totally game for our offbeat idea and ran with it.

We planned to capitalize on our professions and chose an apple and tow truck as clip art. We wanted to tell the story of how we met on one side with arrows, boxes and other wingdingy things.  On the back, we'd have all the details including our wedding website.

We wrote the text and he designed. Many revisions and e-mails later, our invitation was ready to be printed.  Our graphic designer, Darren, is young, modern and so creative that we knew he'd be perfect for the job.  He was so awesome, worked with our vision and made suggestions that we ended up loving.  Mr. Lace and I are usually pretty busy so we had an initial meeting was at the Bucks and the rest of the time he was willing to communicate via e-mail and PDF attachments. He made the invitation process so easy.

In addition to that, we ordered a personalized rubber stamp on Etsy for the return address as well as black envelopes at Action Envelope.  We stamped our return address on the back of the black envelope in white ink.  I printed the tags on Word and adhered them to the front of the envelope with my favorite crafting paste Yes! paste.  

(personal photo)

(personal photo)

In the empty white box, we stamped the return date in green ink thanks to my MOH's awesome magnetic stamping kit. 

I love, love, love receiving full blown invitations with the RSVP card and all, but between the budget and our love of Earth, we decided against it. So, from a bride who has done it, let me weigh the pros and cons for you.

PROS:

1. This was fun to design.

2. We liked that people were surprised by our invitation. It was pretty well-received by friends and family.

3. We could use a regular stamp to mail these bad boys off. International stamps were only 98 cents.

4. We didn't have to spend an arm and a leg on invitations that would more than likely end up in the recycling bin (or trash) after the wedding was over.

5. We got all the information we needed to send out on one piece of paper rather than five.

CONS:

1. A couple people have said, "Thanks for the save the date" and I've had to gently remind them that this was it and they should visit the website to RSVP. 

2. Non-Internet saavy guests may not know how to get onto the website, but we've enlisted Internet saavy family members that will RSVP for them.

3. A few of our older Asian guests were a little disgruntled about BLACK envelopes. I personally loved them.

How did your invitations turn out? Are you trying something a less traditional?