A Working Weekend...

I may have gotten off work Friday around 5:00 (okay, okay it was 3:45, but I left happy hour at 5:00), but the real work started as soon as soon as I pulled out of the parking garage headed down to my parents' house toting our newly printed invitations, a box of goody bags for the kiddos, and a party dress for the wedding we had Saturday night.

Saturday morning, our first project to tackle was the invitations.

My mom ordered Envelopes for the Invites and RSVPs online during Paper Source's fabulous 20% Off online sale and I picked up their Strawberry & Poppy colored oval labels in the store.

I printed our beautiful invites, RSVPs, and maps at FedExOffice on their heaviest cover (110 lb, I believe). We were very, very impressed with the quality of their printing after our STDs and ThankYous and we were able to print a full-color design for less than we could have printed a 2-color design with the printer my sister likes to use.

After a hearty breakfast, we set right to work.

I started with our OOTers. Each of our out of town guests received the Invitation, RSVP and Map. Because our wedding is so large and we believe most of our in town guests will be in attendance, we opted to only send RSVPs to the guests who would be traveling to the wedding.

Thanks to advice from the web, we numbered the RSVPs (35 in total) in case some come back without names.

All together, the invitations took about 2 hours to completely assemble. In addition to the actual stuffing of the envelopes, we had to cut our RSVPs to size, stamp my parents return address on all the envelopes and stick on labels and stamps. I figure 2 hours isn't bad for 158 invitations!

So, they're off!! I can't wait to start getting RSVPs back, I hope all of our guests can make it to the wedding.

Just when we thought we had "The One"...

So, I lied in the last post. The final design I posted wasn't "The Winner" afterall.

My sister wanted to do one final edit on the design to change the colors slightly and pulled a switcheroo on me!

She came across a great font she thought would like great in my invitation suite:

What do you think?

Invite:


RSVP:


Map Front:


Map Back:


**Sorry for the nasty white-outs, I don't want any creepers showing up at my wedding!!

All In The Family, Part I: Graphic Design...

One of the most unique things about my impending nuptial celebration is that we're keeping it "All in the Family"--my Mom is my Wedding Planner, two of my favorite aunts will play DOC, another aunt is making my cake, yet another aunt is a florist and will be doing my flowers, and my sister is my graphic designer. Each one of these people is playing a very important part of my special day and I'm so lucky to have each of them!

My sister's graphic design hobby began in high school when she worked on the yearbook crew and only grew during her 4 years in the Journalism department at Baylor University. Upon graduation, she went to work as Editor-In-Chief of a small magazine and as part of her day-to-day job, she designed Ads to be featured in the magazine. Now she's living across the country doing nothing journalism related professionally, but there was absolutely no questioning her role as the graphic designer for the wedding.

We sat down and fought through everything from the wording to the size of the paper and managed to nail down a basic idea. Since I'm a super visual person, I told her the best way for me to express exactly what I wanted was for her to make up some drafts:




As soon as I opened the file, I knew the background design was a little too busy. I loved the circular design, so we nixed the lines.




A little less busy, but the ampersand was really really driving me and CityBoy nuts, so we requested a slight wording change nixed the "&" altogether.



FINALLY, a version we loved!!

Well, we loved it until we got it test printed and realized the design was a little small and the bleed wasn't going to work the way we wanted with the circles going off the page, so I called up my sister for a rework.



WE HAVE A WINNER!!

You're Invited...

A few months ago my mom, my sister and I were sitting on my mom's bed (our favorite place to congregate at my parents' house) discussing invitations. We pulled out my parents' wedding invitation and numerous samples from various magazines to come up with the perfect wording.

I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty picky about wording. I'm not really a "wordy" person, I like simplicity. I'm not a fan of "oclocks" and "two thousand nines," gimme 4:30 PM and 2009 and I'm happy. I guess its a product of being an accountant, I like things simple and numeric!

We thought we had it down to the PERFECT wording, but there a couple of small changes that could be made.

Option 1:

Small Town Dad & Small Town Mom
welcome you to join us at the marriage celebration of

Small Town Bride &
City Boy

Saturday, September 5, 2009
at 4:00 PM
Small Town Church
Small Town, Texas

Cocktails, Dinner & Dancing to follow
Small Hall
Small City, Texas


Option 2:

Small Town Dad & Small Town Mom
welcome you to join us at the marriage celebration
of our daughter

Small Town Bride to
City Boy

Saturday, September 5, 2009
at 4:00 PM
Small Town Church
Small Town, Texas

Cocktails, Dinner & Dancing to follow
Small Hall
Small City, Texas

Stamped!

Ack...well, its Fuzzy, but this is the Proof of the Stamp we're ordering from Paperwink for our Thank Yous! It looks so weird to see our names together with my future last name!!!
We also ordered one for my Mom & Dad for the Invitations and one for my sister since she found them!

As soon as it comes in, I'll test it for y'all and post some pictures!