As our months of wedding-planning progressed, I started getting the sense that we were doing a lot of things "the hard way." By that, I mean that it seemed like we were making a lot more work for ourselves than most people do. Still, in many aspects, like the invitations, I think it was worth it. :-)
Budget-wise, we did save money by not sending Save-The-Date cards. Those are cool, but I'd read in a magazine that they're only really necessary if your wedding is around a major holiday or if people need to know in advance to make travel arrangements. Christmas was approaching and I was feeling overwhelmed with the wedding, play-season and preparations for Christmas itself, so it was easier just to skip them. I did mention our wedding date in my Christmas cards to my friends who were far away. But, as money is concerned, we definitely went over-budget on the invitations themselves!
A friend from church who also lives just down the road from my parents is a graphic designer (Susan) and volunteered to design our invitations. John and I met with her one afternoon in November or December at an adorable paper shop in Saratoga called Paper Dolls. We looked through books and brainstormed so that she could have somewhere to start. Ultimately, she took away "toile," "calligraphy" and the Latin text of the song "Non Nobis Domine" which I was determined to incorporate into the wedding somehow.
In the mean-time, I started working painstakingly on the wording. For inspiration, our pastor's wife had let me borrow a fat envelope full of all the wedding invitations they've received for years. Dad was definitely in favor of starting it off traditionally with my parents' names, but I wanted to work both sets of parents' names in, so I did. I also decided to include "in the year of our Lord" before "2009" and the word "joyfully" in the first line.
The next time we met with our designer friend, she had a prototype ready, and it was beautiful. Though I'd originally asked her to keep things soft, we decided to deepen the colors into the eggplant purple of the bridesmaids' dresses. We also made it harder on her by changing the shape of the invitation! Mom knows that I love squares (nerd), but since square envelopes cost more to mail, I'd requested a standard 5.5"x8" invitation. But now Mom was encouraging us to go for the square . . .
Several meetings and tweakings later, we were ready to find a printer! Susan got us an insane quote from Paper Dolls, and we checked out Kinkos. Kinkos would have actually been a pretty good choice if we'd gone with the standard 5.5"x8", since two invitations could be printed on a single page with one cut down the middle. But our invitation was a 6" square (4 cuts) and on three layers. That meant there were 3 sheets and 12 cuts per invitation instead of 1 sheet and 1 cut per 2 invitations! That's to say nothing of the reply card. We hadn't foreseen how much our design would inflate printing costs.
Then Susan contacted a printer friend of hers who offered to beat Kinkos' quote and include envelopes. Her product was even a bit nicer, so we went with her. Finally, finally they were finished and printed, a bit later than we'd wanted to get them out in the mail.
As I might have mentioned earlier, John's brother was getting married just about a month before we were, and they'd sent their invitations in pretty green pocket-folds instead of inner envelopes. John loved this idea, so I researched pocket folds online and ordered several samples. We decided on a deep, shimmery eggplant one from cardsandpockets.com and ordered enough for our A-list to start with, since they were kind of pricey.
We also had to attach the three main invitation layers somehow, so we picked up some spools of narrow ribbon from A.C. Moore in an off-gold color. Gold was evolving into our wedding's secondary color. :-) I spent one evening with Susan and her daughter in front of a movie tying all those invitations together with ribbon. We anticipated many more evenings of addressing . . .
But! Happy word. My mom-in-law-to-be came through on this one. She and my dad-in-law actually found and purchased the font which Susan had used for the invitation itself and ran every single reply card envelope and almost every single outer envelope (twice) through her ink-jet printer. I don't think that was an easy mail-merge, since the list of addresses I'd given her was in an Access database. All I know is that I stopped at their home after school on a Friday and the work was all done. :-)
There were two more steps: postage and some means of holding the pocket-folds together. A magazine article I'd read advised bringing a fully packed invitation to the post office to get weighed before buying 180 wedding stamps, so I did. Not only did the square cost more to mail, but the three-layer invitation and sturdy pocket-fold had made it heavy. Wow. I needed to purchase a 60-something cent stamp and a regular 44 cent stamp for each one, plus regular stamps for all the reply card envelopes. I was just happy that they had pretty wedding stamps in both denominations.
John's brother's invitation had a pretty pink ribbon slider holding their pocket-folds, but we didn't want to totally copy them and I was hoping to find a more economical means of holding all of them together. I researched stickers and faux wax seals on-line. One day when Mom and I were looking at similar items in A.C.Moore, we saw good old-fashioned gold sealing wax and just decided to go for it. It was no more expensive than fake wax seals and it was real. Once all the invitations were assembled, with a pressed violet tucked into each one, Derek helped us with the careful art of sealing up all those pocket-folds. I carried them to the post office in boxes. :-)
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