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.

I got a great coupon the other day from the website I’m going to order my invitations from. In fact, it was “order 100 invites, get 50 response cards free” good. That’s freaking GOOD.

NEPA Groom and I were ready to go for it. We trimmed the guest list since we knew it was too big. We made some quick decisions on the food so we could figure out how to word the response card. I was still nervous because I figured someone, somewhere in the family would be pissed because we chose the wrong food/worded the invitations wrong/didn’t ask THEM first. But too bad, I was ready!!

The coupon expires tonight, so I sat down to do a trial run before NEPA groom and I bit the bullet. Then it hit me as I counted up the final guest list again.

You don’t need an invitation for every person on the guest list. If you’re inviting 100 people, you probably need 50 to 60, max. Think about it: married couple = 1 invitation, person with 3 children = one invitation, friend who gets a +1 (even if you don’t know who they’ll be dating by then) = 1 invitation.

Ha. Ha ha ha ha.

Because of this, the coupon didn’t make sense for us any more. We’d be ordering a pile of extra invitations in order to get those free response cards. Neither of us realized this until tonight. It seems so obvious, but everyone I’ve asked was just as confused!

Did you ever almost over-order on wedding supplies? It seems really easy to get confused by this stuff!

I’m stuck with a bit of dilemma right now, and it has to do with these babies:

(source: Wedding Paper Divas)

(source: Wedding Paper Divas)

I’ve been agonizing over Save the Date styles and colors, even ordering samples of the 2 above (along with some invites) from WeddingPaperDivas.com. Then it occurred to me – do we even need Save the Dates?

Our wedding isn’t in a faraway land, the majority of our guests are local or already know about our plans, and we’re not going to be getting married close to a holiday. All those very good reasons for saving STDs (make your own joke this time, I’m pooped) don’t apply to us.

I also read something that made me stop and think: I’ll have to send an invitation to everyone that gets a Save the Date. I know, that sounds obvious but stay with me here. In my excitement, I’ll send out my STDs about 6 months before the wedding. Maybe some of those people will leave our office, or we’ll have a fight, or just grow apart… but they still expect an invitation to the wedding (except for the fighting. No fangz allowed at my wedding). More importantly, what if we need to slash our budget as we get closer to the big day? Of course, we don’t expect to, in fact I’m looking for ways to trim or save up extra money so we can include MORE of the people we want, since we do have to limit ourselves. We still have to prepare for the possibility of it up until we’re ready to send the actual invites. It’s much easier to cut the guest list when they haven’t already been ‘pre-invited’.

The pros to this debate are… um, I want purty papers? Ok, so there aren’t a lot. I could save a couple hundred bucks for something else in our wedding if I pass on Save the Dates. We probably will skip this, but it vexes me.

Did you have Save the Dates at your wedding? Why or why not?