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?

Where we'll be married

I wish I could say that the path to our invitations was easy. Though I am convinced that the ones we finally chose were more perfect than I could have imagined, I do wish I hadn’t stressed myself out about them so much.

It’s funny– finding the venue was tough, but in the grand scheme of things it only took about six weeks. And dress shopping? Piece of cake! Same with most of our vendors. But I’ve always been a big stationery person, and I knew that the invitations were something I did not want to settle for. At the same time, I didn’t want to break the bank on them either. That meant no letterpress for this Bud. I even investigated using a local press that teaches you how to DIY. But since we needed multiple pieces for our destination wedding, it still would’ve been too pricey.

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