Bride-to-be Blogger Alyse: Invitations Sent!


Alyse and Kevin's fun response card.

This past Sunday marked one year since Kevin and I got engaged! I cannot believe it has been one year since I got up before dawn to make scones for a royal wedding party that turned into an engagement celebration. The “to-do list” note Kevin left as a proposal clue was the first of many lists made in this past year, and I have a feeling there are more where that came from.

We celebrated our engagement anniversary on Friday with some pizza, wine and a long night of invitation assembly. (And no, I did not address them myself using my hard-earned calligraphy skills. But I am going to use them for something for the wedding—more on that later.) For a little bit there I was thinking that fourteen months was way too long to be engaged, and thought that the wedding couldn’t come soon enough. But now that we have officially hit the invitation-sending milestone, I realize just how quickly this year went and want to enjoy every moment.

I used the same stationer as I did for our save-the-dates. We ordered the invitations shortly after we had our tasting because the caterer preferred that we include a meal choice on the response card. (Tip to brides: find out if your caterer needs a meal selection so that you can set your tasting in time to order your invitations!).

I went back and forth deciding how formal I wanted the invitations to be and which pieces I wanted to include. I wanted them to be a little more formal since I did something cute for the save-the-dates—but not too formal, so I made some compromises. For the wording, there were many discussions over whether the date should read “July 7, 2012,” or “the seventh of July two-thousand and twelve,” and whether the time should be “5 o’clock in the evening” or “five o’clock in the evening.” (These are the kinds of things that I will be happy to never have to think about again.)

For the different pieces, I decided not to include a separate reception card, and just listed the reception information on the main piece. I know it is traditional to have a separate card, but it all fit and looked good, so I decided to go with it. I did include an accommodations and directions card (even though I am convinced that no one uses these.) The final piece was the RSVP card and envelope that were a little more fun. The return envelope is coral and the RSVP card includes animal pictures instead of meal descriptions (pictured). The whole thing was bound together with a champagne band, which was kind of my favorite part.

Although I was very happy with the end result, the invitation sending did hit a little snag. A few months ago, I ordered 64-cent specialty stamps with the wedding date on them. Well apparently since then, postage for invitations has changed to 65 cents. I mean, really? I traveled to Philly for a quick trip on Saturday and my mom kindly said she’d take care of mailing the invites. I thought about buying new 65-cent stamps, but in the end my mom just got 1-cent stamps to add. I have not seen this 64+1 cent stamp combination, but it’s probably for the best, because I know it would drive me crazy. I will just pretend that the fact that we went with the more formal “seventh of July” and “five o’clock” language totally makes up for the messed up stamp situation. But in reality, I am sure no one will notice either one.

How did you decide how all of your invitation wording would work? Did you go formal? Playful? A mix?

 

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