What's been cool is the response to our invitations. When we made this jump about 5 weeks ago, the first thing I looked for were invitations. I knew I wanted something modern, fun, casual, colorful...nothing with silk bows on the top and script font. But the price! Yikes! So my great idea was to pull in brother (who's a graphic designer) to do the invite and save money, but both he and I quickly learned that the cost is in the printing. It really wasn't substantially cheaper to have him design something and print it out through a printing company. So alternatives began forming.
Now, from this point on, I will admit (and I think I admitted it in an earlier post) that if I had to do the invites over again I would do it differently simply because I've learned a lot of options for invitations in the last few weeks. But with what I knew at the time I simply started doing a google search for invitations - not specifically wedding invitations. I was getting the feeling that you add the word "wedding" onto anything and the cost goes up by like 50%.
So of course, one of the top options is the ubiquitous Target. Ah Target. How I love thee. And I found these super cute invites right off the bat: Cherry Blossom Invite. I loved them. I love pink. I love how it wasn't an uber girly design...I just loved everything about them...most of all I loved the price. However, the BFF came home and wasn't as enthralled with their pinkness or their flowers as I was. Off to Target we went, only to have him come to a fuller conclusion upon looking at them that they were just too feminine.
But right next to my pink ones were two boxes...and two boxes only...of a very simple invitations with green border and a green palm tree. We grabbed them and took them home and you can see the basic result.
Very simple, but very us.The invitations came with a link to a template software which I used, but wasn't fool proof. Though the wording looks centered in this picture, when it printed out it was definitely skewed to the left. And sometimes the d*$! things printed out crooked. And we had the only two boxes of these invitations I could possibly find. They weren't even listed on the Target website. So I was under a lot of stress to get as many correct as possible. You can also see pretty clearly in the JPG that the font is not quite the same color as the border - well, in the template software it looks exactly the same. When we first printed them out the font color was pretty darn close to the border color, but now I'm getting the RSVPs back you can see that as the ink has aged it has taken on a more yellowy-green hue.
Of course, I almost had a nervous breakdown. I had spent so much emotional energy perfecting the layout in the template software that when it wasn't coming out perfect I had this vision of every single person opening their invitations and laughing at me :) But Chris stayed more calm and simply looked me in the eye and said "If anyone doesn't like the invitation we'll simply uninvite them." And that's the attitude to have with this stuff. I was getting wrapped up in the commercialism - for the first time - and it was uncomfortable. I was second guessing the invitations that 2 days before I was totally stoked about. I was judging myself for things like not putting a piece of tissue paper in the envelopes or maybe I should've printed them on vellum so the invites would be layered or maybe I should've gotten a heavier paper weight envelope...
...but then I realized, no one cares. I care. But for everyone else, the invite is gonna get stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. It'll become invisible with children's paintings and candid snapshots and then...horror...it'll get thrown in the trash.
So if my wedding invite to you is a little off...well..so are we :)
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