Showing posts with label the invitations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the invitations. Show all posts

Monday, January 12, 2009

How I Tied the Knot: Our Invitations

Previously in these posts, I shared a little bit about our invitations. Now, it's time to let you all in the details behind our invitation suite and the lessons that I learned along the way as they were crafted. And, of course, some pretty pictures to display along the way!

After scouring blogs and websites for invitation inspiration, I kept feeling that I was coming up empty-handed. After dozens of invitation drafts, I still didn't have an invitation that was juuuust right. However, once Erin from lucky designs sent over our monogram , I finally had a vision for our invitations {and the rest of our wedding, for that matter}.

Our invitations were wrapped in 1.5 inch raspberry {wine} satin ribbon affixed with our monogram square.
The ribbon slid off easily, revealing our lovely invitation:


The invitation itself was affixed to a plum pocket, which held our four insert cards.

Our four insert cards included an RSVP card, a Reception card, an Accommodations card and a card stating directions to venues on one side and a map of the city on the other.
Our invitations could not have turned out as beautiful without the help of April from April Foster Events. She took our rough drafts and worked with our vision and inspiration and {after a couple of tweaks} produced our lovely invitations. I hope that you all love them as much as we {and our guests} did. If you decided to save any of the above pictures for your personal use, or publish them on your blog, please remember to credit tying the knot and April Foster Events.

Lessons Learned #20: I bought the ribbon at save-on-crafts. 50 yards of 1.5 inch thick ribbon was only $6.99+ shipping. Go here to see their selection of ribbon to see if your colors are available!

Lessons Learned #21: April from April Foster Events is a registered vendor of various paper companies. I was able to purchase the plum pockets thru her for an incredibly affordable price. The pockets are one-sided so I was able to affix the invitation to the flat side of the pocket {with double sided tape} and store our insert cards in the pocket.

Lessons Learned #22: About a foot of ribbon was needed to make the ribbon band that fit around our {5x7} invitation/pocket. I overlapped the ribbon slightly and used double sided tape to adhere the ribbon to itself. Then I attached our monogram 2x2 inch square to the ribbon with double sided tape where the ribbon overlapped, in order to hide the overlap. I then slid on the ribbon over the pocket/invitation so that the monogram square was over the center of the invitation.
Lessons Learned #23: The map was created by taking a screen shot of the map of Indianapolis from mapquest.com. Then, using powerpoint we opened up the map screen shot and traced the map using the powerpoint drawing tools. The mapquest map was then deleted, leaving only our tracings. We used text boxes to add in the text and Chris {somehow} created little interstate signs. I found tutorials on weddingbee extremely helpful. You can find them here and here and here.
Lessons Learned #24: I could not have successfully designed our invitations without the help of April from April Foster Events. I literally would have torn my hair out. April was a dream to work with and I would recommend her to anyone. You can reach her at hello@aprilfosterevents.com and if you choose to work with her, please let her know that I recommended her!

Monday, August 11, 2008

Our Invitation Suite

When I begin planning our wedding, I was the most excited about the invitation suite. I knew that the invitation suite was to set the tone for the whole wedding (along with the Save the Dates) and therefore, they had to be perfect.


Long story short, these invitations kept me up at night and had me hating them one moment and loving them the next. Somehow, in the end, I was happy with the results. They are all done and all but two should now, hopefully, be in the hands of their invited guests.

The fiance was nice enough to take pictures of snippets of our invitations, so that I could share them with all of you...

(Please credit tying the knot with the invitation pictures. top: color, bottom: black & white)
Our invitations included a plum koala pouch that was flat on one side and had a pocket on the backside. The invitations were adhered to the flat side with Scotch double sided tape. The four insert cards (smallest to largest) were the RSVP, Reception, Accommodations, and Directions (map on the backside) cards.
We laid them one on top of each other and inserted them into the pocket. The RSVP card return envelope was too big to fit directly behind the RSVP card, so we stuck it behind the accommodations card. The invitation was banded together with a raspberry/wine colored stain 1.5 inch ribbon with our monogram square affixed to it. More pictures to come later.

The koala pocket and paper for the invitation were ordered for me by a vendor that I worked with. In case you are wondering, here are the envelopes that I used for the outer envelope and the RSVP envelope:
In the beginning I had these big goals of learning calligraphy so that I could address the outside of our invitations myself. Well friends, that didn't happen. What I ended up doing was purchasing a plum sharpie and creating my own calligraphy. And it looked goooood if I do say so myself. Pictures to come. The RSVP envelopes were run thru my printer to display my parents home address on the front of the card in the font that we used for the rest of our invitation suite.

Monday, April 28, 2008

RSVP

Here it is friends, the first draft of our RSVP card and a sneak peak as to what our invitation set will look like. You likey?!

Knowing me, one draft is never enough and there is one change that I am debating: the wording of the "response."

There are many different options for the "response," and I would like to know what you think that ours should say! Do you prefer:
1. the wording on the card above: would be delighted/regret to decline
2. graciously accepts/regretfully declines
3. will attend/ will not attend
4. accept with pleasure/ decline with regret

Please leave a comment below or cast your vote on the right hand side of the screen.
Your help is much appreciated!
{Update: 41 total votes. #1: 6, #2: 10, #3: 5, #4: 20}