Wedding Wednesday – Invitations

Invitations were sent out last month, and almost every RSVP card has been received!

I've mentioned before that our friend, Anne, designed our invitations for us. Here's a little bit about how the process worked:

• We got engaged and Anne offered to design our invitations (thanks, Anne!) We then took 2 years to get the ball rolling. Luckily, Anne was still on board.
• Anne sent us a collection of over 30 invitation designs to look at to help give her a general idea of what we like.
• Kate and I each chose our 10 favorites from the bunch. (Only 2 overlapped.)
• We sat down with Anne and looked at each of the designs that we had flagged. We described to her what we did and did not like about each one. This could have been the shape, color, font, paper, style, whatever. We talked and Anne took notes.
• Anne translated all of our babbling into common themes and headed back to New York to get to work.
• A few weeks later, she sent us 3 designs that she had created. She definitely got a good feel for what we wanted, and one stuck out as the true winner.
• We tweaked the wording a little bit, and Anne worked on a matching RSVP card. (She was able to get us postcards with our address pre-printed on them, which saved us paper, postage, and time - woohoo!)
• Anne got quotes from 2 printers and then got a proof from the one we chose. She sent us pics, gave us her thoughts, and we approved it. (She would have sent us the physical proofs, but we were in a time crunch so we opted to trust her professional opinion.)
• She placed the order with the printer and got them rush delivered to our doorstep, just in time to be mailed out.
• I hand-addressed each envelope because I like the look of pen on paper. (I hand-addressed our save-the-dates, too.) Kate attached the stamps, stuffed the envelopes, and sealed them.

We asked Anne to design the reception invites and RSVPs, and we took on the task of creating the ceremony invites. At the time, we didn't have the details nailed down yet (when, where, who would be invited.) Once we did, I cashed in a super-sweet Living Social deal at VistaPrint. These were (fairly) easy to design, very inexpensive with my discounts, great quality, and turned around quickly. I just love how they look with the other pieces! The color almost matches perfectly to the ribbon on Anne's design.

(I blurred out some of the information so people don't crash our wedding. )

I'm not sure how the process typically works, but I thought this went well. There was a small point where I was nervous things wouldn't get finished in time (we were slow-moving and Anne has a crazy-busy schedule), but it all worked out. I liked that we were working with a friend because we could trust her opinion and knew that she wanted the best for us. I also loved working with someone in the graphic design business as opposed to the wedding business. Anne was most concerned about how things looked, and wasn't about to push traditional wording on us (something we knew we didn't want.)

Planning this wedding has definitely been a test in separating out what we want from what we're "supposed" to do. I have to say, working with friends and family has been such a help on that front. So many people have offered up their skills and time to assist us, and everyone has listened to our requests and helped make this our wedding. The better people know me and Kate, both as individuals and as a couple, the better they are at reading us and interpreting our desires. I love that our special day will be sprinkled with touches from people we love!

(Sorry, apparently the cheese-factor is sky-rocketing as the day approaches!)