Another thing that has happened recently that I did not have the time to blog about immediately was our invitations.  We worked with Custom Paperworks’ Kate out of Michigan to design us a travel-themed invitation to go with our travel-themed wedding.  Custom Paperworks specializes in passport-styled invitations (among many other beautiful things), primarily for destination weddings, but also for those like us who are travel fanatics.  I found Custom Paperworks back when we first got engaged by doing a Google search for travel themed wedding invitations. Kate’s work immediately grabbed my attention for being wonderfully unique, yet elegant.  I immediately reached out to her to secure a start date for my invites.  That start date came & went in April this year. At that time, Kate and I started work on my charcoal gray & ivory elegant passport invites, and I think she captured exactly what I wanted.  Gorgeous charcoal gray passport invitation with elegant ivory foil printing on the front and ivory inside pages with curvy black print.  Check them out for yourself:

Continue Reading

I had taken a few pictures of my wedding invitations – but of course can’t find them now.  I’ll have to pull out the box at some point and snap some photos for you.

As a designer and artist I was pretty set on doing a little bit of DIY with my invites.  But I was doing a very classic wedding, so I needed to have them professionally printed beforehand.

I went to a local boutique invitation company in Bethesda, called Creative Parties.  One of the women sat with me and went through about 10 of those huge (very heavy) binders picking out the perfect color, shape, font, etc (which you will see in Part 2).  The one thing I KNEW I wanted and had to make sure everything worked with – was the pocketfold.  This was probably my favorite part of our invites, and given all of the ’stuff’ that you send out to people, it was perfect for keeping everything in one place.

I went with something like this, although ours were vertical and not horizontal:

http://www.lcipaper.com/pockets-by-size.html

Are you using pocketfolds or double envelopes to make sure all of the pieces stay together?

I’m one of those girls who actually understands maps, in fact I actually have a map in the map pocket of my driver’s door (old fashioned right?).

I’m starting to feel a need for bridal GPS assistance however. It’s slowly starting to dawn on me how crazy the next 12 months are going to be and how much of a work out my GPS is going to get!

The bulk of wedding preparation will be done from my apartment on the University of Mount Union’s campus. My parents are a 3 hour drive into Pennsylvania and my future in-laws are 30 minutes south. I purchased my dress at the Alfred Angelo store in Boardman, Ohio. Our photographer, my good friend (and crucial planning buddy!) as well as the good bridal shows are all in Cleveland. Thankfully, lots of things can be done online! But sometimes you just have to head to the store for things, and my stores are another 30 minutes away in Canton, Ohio.

Continue Reading

The time has come to reveal our lovely wedding invitations. I did a lot of research and put so much thought into our formal invitations. I wanted my personality, as well as Towie Bear’s to shine through our wedding stationery.

Our signature color is Tiffany blue mixed with black and white. The theme is the blending of two cultures and the following image is what we got.

Tiffany blue is definitely the star of the show. However, the black and white create the right balance for such a bright color. Our stationery vendor designed the logo that you see on the middle of the card. The logo was used as the seal of our invitation. We also used the same logo in our video shown on our wedding website.

Continue Reading

My maid of honor, along with my bridesmaids and future mother-in-law have been organizing my bridal shower. I recently receiving my bridal shower invite and I thought it was lovely.

MOH tried really hard in finding a card that matched our wedding colors. This invitation is just perfect. She did a lot of research and got it all made through the Internet. The company that made these is called InvitationBox.com I thought this was quite amazing.

Continue Reading

As mentioned in my photography post one of my bridesmaids was married this past year. In planning her wedding, her “thing” was the invitations. As I alluded to, they were quite spectacular. I thought you all might enjoy a few photos of them as well as her description of how to make them.

Continue Reading

While I’m organizing our rehearsal dinner, I decided on making the invitation sweet but simple. As some of you already know, I am a devoted Mindy Weiss fan. She recently started a stationery line called Mindy Weiss for the Inviting Company.

Continue Reading

Is it possible to be in love with paper?  I came home from work yesterday to a big box waiting for me on our kitchen counter….OUR INVITATIONS!!!  I probably spent a month designing the invite, rehearsal card, and response card myself.  Then I saved them as PDF files and sent them off to Vista Print to be made.  I was nearly jumping up and down and crying happy tears when I pulled them from the box as I wondered if they were going to be as perfect in person as I had expected them to be  They were.   They were worth the time and all of the revisions it took to make them perfect.  Here they are -

Please excuse the black splotches where I got rid of identifying information.

Has anyone else designed their own invites? If so, I would love to see them.

…from the White House!!!  That’s right Buds and Blossoms, Periwinkle Dude and I received a special treat in the mail from Mr. Post Man.  Want to see what it was????  Why it’s…

… a congratulatory note from President and Mrs. Obama!

Continue Reading

So, we’re in the process of writing out our envelopes for our save the date cards, and I’m wondering — how many of you follow the intense etiquette rules for wedding invitation addresses?  Just browsing online, I’ve seen a myriad of rules and regulations, many of which I have NOT been following. Here are some examples of the things I’m seeing:

Continue Reading