Wedding Invitations!

The invitations went out on June 1st and they have all been returned.
We gave our final count and meal choices to the venue yesterday.

About 8 months ago I found wedding invitations I liked when a friend of ours was invited to a wedding. I asked every invitation store/bridal fair vendor I saw, if they made something like it. I had no luck. So, I talked to the print shop guy at our school. He said if I wanted to design something, he could probably print it.

About 6 months ago I started on the design. I knew I wanted it to be 3 pages, bound like a little flip book. The front page is the invitation, the second is the venue information with directions and our website, the third is the response card.

I knew I wanted to use our wedding colors in the invitation and make it very personal to us. One of the things I love about our invitations is the background image. The image is a G and a Z representing each of our last names, and I manipulated and rotated them so they fit together to create a swirling image. Most people don't see it unless you point it out. I think it's kind of clever if I do say so myself.

Being the frugal bride that I am, I thought it was a perfect way to save on postage by creating an invitation with a postcard response. The last page of the invitation has a perforation along the side so all you have to do is tear off the card and mail it in.

We ran into a few bumps along the way while creating our invitations. I shopped for the paper and matching envelops and got ready to print the design. In the middle of this, the print shop teacher ended up going on leave. We got lucky and a teacher friend of mine knows the owner of a print shop. North Shores Printery in Pacific Beach did an amazing job on our invitations. They took my exact design and did beautiful work. He knew we were in a little bit of a bind (we thought the guy from school would be back in time to print them, so we held off for longer than we should have), and got them printed in less than a week for next to nothing in cost!

We spent less on professionally printed, personally designed invitations, than what we could have ordered catalog ones for.

I couldn't have been happier with the final outcome. We also got a wonderful gift from my kindergarten teacher and calligrapher, Mrs. Veninga, who addressed all our invitations for us.

What do you think?


Only 2 weeks left until the wedding day!!