It's Official!

The invitations have been mailed!

After two long weeks of printing and assembling, calling for addresses, and addressing each envelope by hand I turned them over to the care of the Post Office. We even got our first RSVP returned yesterday (an 'accept with pleasure!'. No mind it was from my Matron of Honor. . . ahem. . .it was still exciting!)

Less than a week previously, we had the Post Office weigh one of our invitations so we could find out what to expect postage-wise. We were quoted $1.00 each (ouch!) which was to be expected because we made the mistake of using square envelopes (odd size = extra postage) out of heavy card stock (extra weight = extra postage). What we found particularly strange, however, was that in a return trip to the post office to buy the stamps we were quoted $1.17 each.

This was before the postage rate increase. The same invitation, weighed by two different employees, and a $.17 difference? It really makes me wonder how 'accurate' their scales are, or if there was a gap in one or the other employees training.

I politely mentioned this to the employee who quoted us the $1.17 (who was also the manager!) and he looked at me like we had made the story up and were trying to scam the Post Office out of $.17!

It wasn't worth the argument, although I'm glad I had it re-weighed (otherwise all of our invites may have hit mailboxes around the country with 'postage due'. Talk about a major etiquette blunder!). I also brought up the argument about one of our invites hitting another scale in their system; how do we know it won't come up with yet another (potentially higher) rate? The manager didn't appreciate my comment!

I also asked him that, since their wedding stamps don't add up to $1.17 and I'd be paying $1.22 for each invitation (two wedding cake stamps at $.61 each) if they would mind hand canceling each envelope (instead of getting the machined red bar on it they use a rubber stamp. . .it looks much nicer) and he very curtly told me he'd do it if he 'had' to and only if they weren't busy. He also said that the machine stamp isn't going to 'ruin' my invitations and didn't understand why I was worried about it.

Good grief. Anybody that knows me knows that I'm the farthest thing from a Bridezilla. I don't know if this guy had some bride in there making a fuss once and now he hates all of us, but I definitely think he needed an attitude check.

I wanted the hand cancel because we spent a lot of money on these invitations, and it's proper etiquette to have them hand-canceled (just like they are hand addressed).

But I digress. The invitations are out, and things are moving along! Two months from today we'll all be together at our venue, and I'm still in disbelief that we're already this close.

Details details. . . .

Rehearsal Dinner Invitations

I decided to send out invitations for our rehearsal dinner so that our guests can plan their weekend in Colorado accordingly. The city where our wedding will take place is a two + hour drive from Denver International Airport, and while I trust everybody to know there *will* be a rehearsal dinner, I thought sending an actual invitation would be a nice touch.

Not only that, but I needed a way to use up left over paper from the wedding invitations!

Our venue recommended a few restaurants, among which was an Italian restaurant known to locals. In my research, I found that they had hundreds of fabulous reviews, not to mention the fact that they were incredibly affordable. Other restaurants wanted to charge us a room fee for our rehearsal dinner, which is ridiculous considering that it really is just a large group like any other meeting they might have. The staff was very nice and accommodating on the phone, and I couldn't believe the fabulous quote they gave us.

They will serve our guests salad, rolls, drinks, and family style Italian entrees (great! Just what I need, a plate full of pasta the night before I have to fit into my wedding dress. . .oh dear. . .) while the river rushes by the patio where they host large parties. It is the perfect combination of mountains and great food!

Dave and I both agreed that we wanted the rehearsal invitation to have a lighter, less formal feel than our wedding invitations but still tie in with our mountain theme.

I found a velum paper with pine printed on it, and paired it with leftover 'Galvanized' and 'Opal' metalic paper to create this invitation.

The velum can be lifted up to make the text more readable, and reads the following poem:

Dave popped the question and Chris said 'Yes'!

Now all the planning is over from the dinner to the dress.

Only one thing remains for this day to be great

'Practice Makes Perfect' and (date) is the date!

We'll practice the ceremony
And iron out the kinks

Then it's off to (restaurant) for some dinner and drinks!

Please join the Bride and Groom to Be

(Time and location information)

Children for Dinner. . . .

Over the weekend two of my bridesmaids came over to help me print and assemble our invitations, which are scheduled to be in the mail by May 10th.

Months ago Dave and I bought a really nice Epson Workforce 600 printer; our intention for this machine was not only for business use (the copier and fax features are amazing) but to be the workhorse for our wedding invitations. We were promised by both Best Buy and online specifications of the model that this copy-scan-print-fax device was going to do the trick.

However, in preliminary testing here at home it failed miserably; while being fabulous for business use, it refused to run print on the heavy card stock we would be using for the invitations. Every time we set it to print something the rollers would spit out several pieces of paper before crying out that it was jammed up or otherwise needed to be turned off and left alone to sulk. Fabulous.

Feeling the crunch as of late to solve this problem and get the invitations prepped for mailing we looked at our options:

a. Take the Epson back to Best Buy and haggle for something that *would* actually work. This would be difficult seeing that we've had the printer for several months now. We love the Epson for everything else, so it stays.

b. Go to Kinkos. In my experience, Kinkos is really good at messing up print orders. . .not to mention the $1.00 page fee for color printing. Yikes. My stubborn theory is that I wanted to do the invitations myself, not trust them to any high schooler who would be working the counter that day.

c. Buy another printer. Sounds easy enough, right? Dave said that they have this cheap little HP printer at work they use for cardstock, and never have any problems.

So, I went on the hunt for the cheapest little printer I could find; bonus points if printing was all it did! My search landed Kirstin and I at Staples, where a man who worked there offered to run 110lb card stock through some of the cheapest printers they had. As we were getting discouraged, he remembered a Brother fax machine they had up front on clearance for $35.00.

Yes, $35.00. Half the price of the cheapest printer they had in stock. . .a fax machine that printed in color.

After confirming the 14 day return policy, the printer/fax came home with us. . .and believe it or not it worked without a hitch! Upon closer inspection, the print quality is just as good (if not better) that what the Epson was offering on the rare occasion we could get it to take a piece of card stock. The only caveat? It's very very slow to print - so we have to set it to print 20 sheets and walk away.

Now, the title of this post is 'Children for Dinner,' and for that I shall explain.

I have been meaning to reformat the RSVP cards for months now, never having been happy with the wording. Theresa cut the card stock to size while I made my edits (edits that were meant to make the card much less confusing, as well as some little things that my wonderful future Mother-in-Law pointed out) and in our haste to get started we never really proofread the new card. All 3 of us took a look at it, said 'looks great!' and set the fax machine to print 45 of them.

It took it just over 2 hours to finish the process, and only after we had started on another piece of the invitations did we realize the absolutely awful, yet hilarious mistake that I had made on the card.

We were offering children for dinner.

We were so excited to start printing and assemble the invitations that this was completely overlooked. In addition to fixing that, I'm going to change the date so it reads June 5, 2009 instead of June 5th, 2009, and will set the printer to have at it again.

On a better note, I have plenty of card stock leftover to re-make these, and as of yet our $35.00 lonely clearance printer is still not out of ink!

DIY Pocket Fold Invitations

Another budget-friendly way to personalize a wedding is with DIY invitations. After looking through catalogs and finding most options to be overpriced, boring, and expected I turned to other brides for inspiration.

The pocketfold invitation trend is growing in popularity, and with due reason! It is especially appealing to brides like myself who don't like opening beautiful wedding invitations and having the inserts fall out onto the floor or table. Pocketfold invitations are sleek, organized, and being new to the wedding scene; unique. I liked the idea of doing them, rather than hiring a printing company, for the simple fact that they would then be both highly personalized, and purchased at less than 1/2 of the cost to buy them commercially.

My future Mother-in-Law and I began at a paper supply store, where we pulled samples and unanimously decided that metallic card stock (despite being more expensive) was the way to go to create a professional, elegant, and beautiful invitation.

I turned to www.cardsandpockets.com, who offer inserts and the actual pocket fold in the curious metallic line. They send us samples of the colors, and with little debate, Dave and I chose square sand folders, emerald mats (precut), opal invitation page and R.S.V.P. card, caramel directions insert, and galvanized attractions insert. The emerald provides a pop of color, and the carmel and galvanized exactly match the graphics we are using.

The emerald mats came precut to fit the square pocketfold, and I am using a paper cutter to cut the rest from 8.5 x 11 to size as follows:

R.S.V.P. : 4 x 5
Direcitions: 5 x 5
Attractions: 6 x 5

Each insert is one inch taller than the last, leaving just enough room for the title.

We downloaded paint.net (a free paint program) which allowed us to crop out a blue Colorado Columbine from a photo Dave took. I had to zoom in about 400 times, and go around the exterior of the Columbine to erase erroneous pixels. Once that was done, we saved it and now it's used like a stamp on the invitation. (Photo to right: before removing extra pixels).

We then downloaded the Aramis font from 1001fonts.com, worded the invitation, and started putting it all together! Dave used Google Maps to create a fantastic map for our guests.

I used acid-free glue tape from Staples to glue the mat and invitation together. The text will be printed onto the invitation at Kinkos. Unfortunately, we bought a nice printer for this project and were told it could handle card stock, however all it does is jam up the rollers. This of course, adds somewhat to my budget for this and has put me over, so I've made accommodations elsewhere (like making my crinoline, below).

At Micheal's I found table confetti from Brides.com that is ivory shimmer card stock flowers. I paired them with sheer green ribbon to create the belly bands; something we weren't originally going to do however we felt that something was missing from the outside.

Our invitations, which would have cost over $10.00 each to do professionally, cost less than $5.50 each and that includes postage. A bit over my budget, but definitely reasonable considering the beautiful result!