Our Wedding: Invitations

We sent our invites out the first week in March and I was very late getting them out. My plan was to get them sent the beginning-mid February but that didn't happen. So between moving from a rental, into our house, and working on other wedding projects we finally were able to sit down and work on these babies. It was such a relief to have them sent out, and for people to start receiving them, sending their RSVP's.

I originally had a letterpress design in mind for our invitations, but they were way out of our budget. I also took a class last year so I could do some pretty calligraphy on each envelope and our escort tags, but that didn't happen, and hiring someone to do that for us was just out of the question. My calligraphy handwriting wasn't up to par and I definitely needed more practice.

Fortunately, early on into our engagement I was very blessed to have won a very generous giveaway on a blog about a year before our wedding for this invitation suite. The invitations are from MagnetStreet Weddings, I won 150 invitations with envelopes, and RSVP postcards. All I had to pay for was the sticker labels to seal the front flap, and stamps. MagnetStreet Weddings was a pleasure to order from. Their customer service was beyond excellent. I received our order within a couple weeks and didn't have any problems. The only confusing part was to try and figure out the Ceremony start time and whatnot (a year in advance!) so we could order these way in advance.

Without further ado....

Front of the envelope with the wrap label (I used a piece of paper here for the wrap label to give you an idea. I didn't want to affix an actual label and stamp, waste a perfectly good, unused envelope).

Back of the envelope with the wrap label return address on the back.

Front of the invitation! A small round black and white photo sticker label (from our engagement session) is missing. It was used to close the flap. I didn't have anymore left to show you, sorry! With the invitation open. The bottom pocket portion is holding our RSVP postcard. More close up I whited out our last names and address for privacy

This is what the front of the RSVP postcards looked like. I didn't take a picture of the back, but all that was on the back was a return address and a stamp. The picture above is an example of one of the funny RSVP's we got back. Of course you always have that person who thinks they're hilarious and gets a joy in confusing the Bride & Groom! Sometime in April we found out this was Daniel's boss's wife who accidentily did this! haha

For the most part our RSVP's served their purpose but even after our deadline we hadn't heard from about 15 guests. I have to say, it did bother me that we spent a good amount of money on stamps for the postcards and a lot of them weren't even used/mailed back to us. Some guests even personally gave us their postcards with our stamps still on them so with those I carefully removed the stamps so we could reuse them! ha

For those of you getting married, don't put too much time, thought, or money into the RSVP's! Postcards and online RSVP'ing are great ways to cut costs if that's the route you're taking.

I hope you liked them! I apoligize they aren't being shown in their best light, but they are rather simple anyway. At the time we sent these I took some nice photos of Daniel and I cutting the wrap labels (they were printed on one large sticker sheet and we cut them into strips) and we had a little assembly line going on, but I can't find the pictures now. I did ask the post office to hand cancel each envelope, so they wouldn't get all ruined when being processed.

We were very happy with the end result and I heard postive feedback from our family and guests. I felt like they were very "us" and fit our classic, starfish themed beach wedding perfectly!