Kyle and I had a very very busy Christmas and New Years: we went from my maternal grandparents to his maternal grandparents to his paternal grandparents to my paternal grandparents! In two days!! All in all, it culminated in 10 hours in the car!
We didn't even get presents for each other because of Rome and Long Island being sort of Christmas and birthday presents for/from both of us. We've spent quite enough money thank you and we'll be spending even more in preparation for this lovely wedding.
We spent a scant few days at home and then headed to our best friends' house in Pasadena, MD (2 more hours in the car!) in order to help Mia with her invitations and Dan with his basement (Kyle helped with the invitations and I hang drywall... do you believe that? No, scratch that, reverse it).
Mia's invitations came out sooooo spectacularly, especially considering she printed them at home and enlisted the help of friends and family to help her cut them out and put them all together. I didn't take any pictures... I'm upset with myself, it didn't occur to me... Well, anyway, somewhere in there I had some time to fiddle with what our invitations are going to look like!
This is the original template just typed up in a word document:
Chocolate brown, all caps for the formal text and a really fun yet rustic font I found online, for freeeeee. That little symbol in between the date info and the "Reception to follow" is just a squiggly, it's a way of saying 'pause for cool symbol.'
When I printed this onto my cool German paper, the sort of forest green color came out kinda' dark puke yellow... graphic enough? Well, it was just not quite what I had in mind, so I decided to scrap any sort of green in favor of keeping my original color scheme:
The only issue I take with this scanned in image of the color scheme is that the burgundy should have a bit more purple tone in it, not too much, but, just go with the flow. Yeah, also, who names a color Bagdad Brown???
So, I attempted to trace over the cool font with a burgundy (more purple) colored pencil, sharpened really really sharp, and it didn't turn out too bad, but I apologize if the words are no longer legible, you know our names anyway, so who cares. I also shaded in the corners with some chocolate and burgundy blending pencils and added some stamping to the corners. Now, I messed up a little on the invite, so as far as design, the Save the Date is my favorite as far as how it turned out. Look to the Save the Date for how I want them all to look:
I forgot to mention I also tore them out instead of cut so that I would get that rough edge... that's going to take longer than anything. I must also note that the Save the Date in my hands is a little more off-white or cream or ivory, it looks really white on my screen. The more yellow invitation is a true color. With the brown and burgundy, I don't think I like the paper so yellow-ish. I would rather a cream color. I found some paper at Office Depot of all places that was only $12 for 100 sheets and may just end up being our paper, who knows! In the meantime, tell me what you think! I love how the turned out. Kyle says the text is too small and he thinks the wording on the invitation is weird (I have tried desperately to explain to him that is my parents are presenting me, my last name does not need to be one there!!! but does he listen?!?!) but otherwise he's on board, which is nice because he actually took the time to look at them and give me his honest opinion. He likes the edges and the rustic feel. Yay!
Now as far as the set-up, I believe I am sold on the vertical tri-fold; invitation in the middle, pocket on the left with the inserts, flap on the right just to fold everything together. The example below does not have a flap on the right, so I designed one up with some rectangles and such so you could see what I want it to look like:
Picture the green-brown color a little lighter brown, a bit like the one in the real example, and then I was thinking a strip of burlap to wrap around the whole thing, and then a twine or hemp string to tie the whole thing together, including a dried, pressed flower, which I am not 100% sure on yet, but it's just an idea I'm throwing around in my head.
I recognize how much work is involved here, I have not yet decided how much I want to do myself (the design/blending pencils/stamps) and how much I want to buy (the tri-folds perhaps). At least printing turned out really well. I did see a blog post somewhere in which the bride designed her invites, like I did, but then posted her design up to Vistaprint. She got the homemade look but she only had to design it once, then got it copied and printed elsewhere. I then saw though that the design she made was a computer-generated design, not a painstaking, hand-blended, scanner-sensitive masterpiece!!!
I digress, I will not give more weight to this than necessary. It took me about 5 minutes to do one of these... 1 invitation, 1 save the date, 1 RSVP, 1 directions insert, 1 table card, 1 thank you note... 50 repeats... 25 hours... Money saved?? about $400... I know I know, it all sounds crazy!!! But I worked it out, it should take me about 4 hours to do each component, so if I set a couple weekends aside and do one component per day, I can have ALL this done in a few weeks!
The more I think about it, the more do-able it seems, just with patience, and more than a few breaks. More on this as it progresses, for now, back to work!! All opinions are welcome!!!
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