Our invitations were a labor of love for me, even if I didn’t do most of the work!

I knew I didn’t want to try and design them, or even print them, myself, so I spent a long time online researching my options. I ordered samples from a few places, which I highly recommend for online invitation shopping. You really don’t know exactly how they are going to look until you see them in person. Case in point, a lovely lady who got married two weeks after me that I know from my old job ordered invitations online, and while they were done to her specifications, she was unhappy. The invite was supposed to have a background of different ‘marriage and love’ words in all kinds of sizes and fonts. The problem was that on her computer screen, the background was a very visible gray. In person, it was so light you couldn’t read them, which wasn’t what she wanted.

In the end, there was a clear winner that matched the rest of our theme: the Butterfly Love invitation from Wedding Paper Divas.  They were perfect:

(picture by Tammy Martines Photography. Details blurred by me)

I don’t have a picture of the whole invitation suite, but we went with a mix of formal and informal elements, as the vibe we wanted to give off was classic but casual and fun. We chose the main invitation, reception information card and RSVP card. We paid a little extra to have Wedding Paper Divas print return addresses on the envelopes, which saved some headaches.

I also got really obsessed with envelope liners. WPD doesn’t do them for all of their invitations, such as ours. I was able to find an almost perfect match for them though. Mountaincow stationary offers liners in tons of colors for both rounded and square envelope flaps. We got a light purple shimmer that was a nice complement to the deep plum.

I also really liked this set because you could get a matching wed site at Nearlyweds.com. I paid the fee to have this matching site, and used it to put a lot of additional helpful information up for our guests. It was really simple to use, though I am a bit jealous because it seems like they have a lot of new features that weren’t available when we were engaged!

All in all, I am very happy with how everything about our invitations came together. I started early and it gave us a lot of time to think things over, make mistakes, and change our minds. We got tons of compliments on them, and they’re still one of my favorite projects from our wedding day.

If you’re still here at this point, you get a cookie.

It’s just over a year since I last updated this blog, when I was about 6 months away from our wedding. Now we’ve been married for 6 months and I am back. Or attempting to be back.

So what happened?

Planning our wedding got unexpectedly stressful. Multiple well meaning people tried to offer help that we didn’t need. Help that, perhaps unconsciously, was trying to change the wedding we wanted into the wedding they thought it should be. Between backhanded comments or the silent treatment over decisions as silly as how many entree options we offered, and people buying wedding supplies for us after we had already purchased the same supplies on our own, got downright insulting at points. As if we didn’t know what we were doing.

So, I had to step away. If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all, right? It got worse, a lot worse, up until the week before the wedding. It seemed as if no one just trusted us to throw a simple party. And that weddings are only done one way and we will remind you of this every single day in the hopes we will wear you down and get what we want. It was exhausting.

But then, things got better. Family arrived, and it was too late for any more decisions. Supplies were dropped off, and out of my hands. And the day was wonderful.

My hope now is to go back and recapture some of that for those of you who have stuck around. I’ll try to wrap up the posts I had half written before I left, and I’ll try to cover all the fun things before the wedding, like picking out invitations and all of that. I want to review all the vendors I used too after I share some of our wedding with you. But I think my posting will be slower. Maybe once a week. To rest my arms (I work on the computer all day and they do get sore) and to give us time to savor the experience.

Then after that… well, this year I get to be a bridesmaid not once, but TWICE! That’s twice the joy and twice the wedding planning for 2011. Let’s rock the shit out of this.