Paper Products - Planning Bio

The Finished Invitations

Yayyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They are finally done and in the mail as of 10/24. This has got to be one of the biggest wedding tasks and accomplishments so far. I'm scared to think about how majorly in debt I am to my mom for making these. I always wanted to help more with them, but school never really let me. I just did the photoshop stuff and she put almost all of it together.

Here's the finished product!

I ordered a return address stamp pad and used a white Archival stamp pad on the back flap of the envelope. Then we put some light blue snowflake stickers from Oriental Trading to keep it sealed.

Here's the front!

Here it is when it's opened up. The invitations are glued in.

Here are the inserts: Directions (with a full SA map on the back), RSVP, and Accomodations. I used two different snowflake stamps and Memento stamp pads in a light blue and dark blue and stamped every insert. Took just a little while. ;o)

A week ago I wasn't completely sure what was going to happen with all of the wedding stuff because of a family emergency. Here's the summary: My dad went out running last Sunday (10/18) and had a cardiac arrest. One of our neighbors found him in the street and started CPR. The paramedics were able to shock his heart and get it into rhythm right away. He was then rushed to the ER and was put into induced hypothermia and sedated for 24 hours. They were able to warm him up and wake him up on Monday night. He was pretty out of it Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday he finally started feeling better. His short term memory was shot those first days (think Dori from Finding Nemo), but it's pretty much all better now.

Anyway, that whole week my mom and I spent our days in the ICU with my dad. Once my dad was feeling a little better and got moved up to the progressive ICU, we carted over the invitations to my dad's room and set up shop. We even got chewed out by one nurse, but persevered and were able to get them finished Friday night. So early Sat morning we headed over to the Post Office and got them sent out. So so exciting. :o)

Here was our set up in the hospital with my amazing sister (MOH) working hard.

My sister (MOH) was the only one who could get the return address stamp to work very well, so we gave her that job.

Here they are at the Post Office! They ended up costing $0.78 so we used the 61 cent wedding cake stamp, and the only 17 cent stamp was a blue ram. I didn't really care, and at least it was blue. :o)

Save the Date Postcards

I designed these using Photoshop and then ordered postcards through VistaPrint. I used one of their 100 Free Postcard deals, so even though they get you with the upload fees (I had to pay for images for both the front and back) and shipping, I still only paid about $14. And since these are postcards, we can use the 27 cent postage instead of the normal 42 cent rate. Yay!

Will You Be My Bridesmaid? Cards

I wanted to ask my BMs in some way other than just a phone call, and even though this idea isn't as original as it used to be, I still thought it would show them how important they were to me. It took me a little while to make these, but I think they turned out great and they loved them.

Envelopes

We decided to go with a dark blue metallic envelope. I know this is not very common or traditional, but I really loved the idea of having some color in the envelope, and my mom and fell in love with the way a dark blue metallic paper looked against the white pocketfold.

I ordered a pack of 100 Stardream Lapis Lazuli from envelopemall.com in the 6"x9" booklet for $31 something ($40 with shipping). It was the cheapest I could find and the shipping ended up being super fast (I ordered on Mon night and had them by Friday). I'm so excited about these! I can't wait to take them up and have my mom calligraphy one.

Here is a picture of the envelope. It's actually a lot darker in person because the flash highlights the blue, but you can still see the richness of the dark blue.

Here's a picture without the flash. The blue is much prettier in person, but this is probably truer to the darkness of the color.

Here's a picture of just a piece of paper we bought at a scrapbooking store to see how the dark blue metallic would look against the pocketfold. I kind of calligraphied (my version sucks!) to see how it looked with the white ink.

So as I mentioned before, my mom is going to calligraphy the front addresses. She's an actual calligrapher, so they will turn out much better than the above one. :o)

She had originally said she could just write the return address on the back herself, but with so much other stuff to do I decided it might be nice to not make her do that. So, I ended up ordering a hand stamp from RubberStampChamp.com. I made my own black and white design in photoshop and then uploaded it to the site. I got the 3/4" x 2" size for $7.75 They offer free shipping for orders over $10 (yea, I had to re-read that thinking they accidentally left off a zero or something), so I went ahead and ordered a 3/4" square stamp of a snowflake for $4.25. I'll let you know how they are when I get them next week!

Invites

And the invite production has officially begun! It finally took my FMIL reminding my mom over Labor Day weekend that we were at 103 days out, which equaled panic time. My poor mom. I think she did start panicking because out came the invitation supplies and before I knew it she had all of the white pocketfolds cut out and folded.

UPDATE 10/10: We are getting close to being done! All of the pocketfolds are finished. The invitations themselves are all done except we might add a dark snowflake on top of the ribbon (have to wait on new snowflake punches, the old ones pooped out). The insert designs are all done, now we just need to have them printed. Then we will cut them out and stamp them with blue snowflakes. The calligraphy is all done except for about 5 envelopes that we need updated addresses on.

We weighed one of the invitations last night and it came out to 2.25 oz. The cut off between $0.61 and $0.78 is 2 oz. We didn't have the real inserts in yet (we were planning on using 110lb cardstock and right now the ones in it are on 67lb) so I don't know if that will increase the weight at all. I'm really hoping my mom's letter scale was slightly off and we could somehow get them for the 2oz rate. Seriously, an extra 0.25oz won't break anyone's back or truck or whatever the ounces matter for. Please just let us save some money?

The Almost Final Invite

Here is the actual FINAL pocketfold:

Here is the inside of FINAL pocketfold with the almost finished invite (we might add an extra snowflake over the ribbon) and the not final inserts (still need to have those printed).

We might add another snowflake to the side of the pocketfold, like you see below. It might be one of the smaller snowflakes though.

If we add a snowflake like below it will be out of a darker blue paper so it shows up better.

Paragraph.

These are the first draft inserts. I have since changed around the maps a little, removed the printed snowflakes (since we will be stamping them instead), and updated info (no more Hotel 1, Hotel 2, etc).

In case you can't read the invites above very well, here is the wording we chose:

In the spirit of love and joy this holiday season

Lindsay Ann Lastname

And

Tyler Justin Lastname,

together with their families

invite you to share in the celebration

of their marriage

on Sunday, the twentieth of December

two thousand and nine

at four o'clock in the evening

Canyon Springs Golf Club

San Antonio, TX

We wanted to keep the invites nice but not very formal. We decided on the font Renaissance, which I think I downloaded for free from dafont.com. It's slightly fancy but I felt it had a fun loopiness to it that keeps it from being too formal. My mom (being the know it all calligrapher) actually said that font is pretty formal, but we just liked the way it looked! Here is the formatting and words in Renaissance (sorry it's all blurry, I don't know why it's doing that!):

Here are some of my inspirations.

Photo Sharing Cards

Just got these in from VistaPrint with one of their Free 250 business card deals. They're simple, but they're what I wanted and you really can't beat it for only $6 for the shipping.

I had a hard time deciding which photo sharing site to use, but ended up picking Flickr for a few reasons:
1) If you get their Pro account ($25/year, not too bad), you have unlimited photo upload and storage (I figure I can upload my pro pics to this site to share with family once I get them after the wedding, which will make good use of their unlimited storage capacity)
2) You can email your photos to the account for upload, so people won't even have to log in if they don't want to.
3) They have pretty good organization tools
4) They allow you to download the files at their original resolution (with the pro account) - something that was very important to me

The other site I was looking at was Picasa through google. They also allow you to download your photos at the same resolution as the original (with the free account). Their free version has 1GB of storage, and their next step up for $20/year is 10GB (and it combines this space with your gmail storage, which might mean that you get the space already in your gmail too, not sure). The main reasons I ended up choosing Flickr instead was because I felt like Flickr's organizing tools were a little better, and also because it was actually unlimited storage (even though the 10GB in Picasa probably would have been enough).