Hav Plenty

Yesterday I briefly mentioned how I struggled with figuring out the program design. But even after finalizing the design, I found something else to get worked up about.

I didn't know how many to print.

I talked to my 'maids and checked online and found all kinds of vague information.

Print one for each guest
Print one for each family
Print one per couple
Print one per couple, and one for each single person
Print the same number of invites
Print 75-85% of the number of guests you anticipate
...etc etc etc

You may have noticed that all of these guidelines pretty much hinge on knowing how many you are expecting at the event. Which is why most brides wait until much closer to the wedding to take care of them. No, this is not an excuse to do them the night before or even the week of the wedding (there is no excuse for that), but you can see why this isn't something you do when you first get engaged, right?

Ultimately, I decided to go with the percentage. I didnt know how it worked, but I could see how planning for 75% of the guests could encapsulate the singles, the couples and likely leave a few leftovers. At the time, I anticipated 150 guests, so I simply multiplied that by 75% and rounded up to the next increment of 5 for 115. Right now we only have 110 guests that have RSVPd, so were well on our way to having plenty left over.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this yesterday, but I am thrilled that this project is complete. It was my last pre-wedding DIY project (not counting the announcements or the favors) and I managed to do it with almost a month to spare (popping my collar). I really love how they turned out, and I think that our guests will enjoy their stylish simplicity.

And I will enjoy the fact that I didn't spend my last evenings as a Miss assembling programs. Lack of DIY projects the week of our wedding: priceless.

♥

Catching Up: Programs

September has been one of those months. Well, now that I think about it, so was August. Anyway, the invites have gone out, I've finished my pre-wedding DIY list, we've (probably) lost a groomsman and gained his replacement, and everyone's attire is all squared away. I know. You would not know that from the way I've been posting.

So I'm going to try and get you caught up, and then bow out gracefully a few days before the wedding. Deal?

Great. Lets get started. Today lets talk about the program.

I was never one of those brides that considered the program to be optional. Granted, my conceptualization of our program has gone through several permutations, I always knew I wanted one, and that it would be teal and green. Just like every other thing with weddings, there are several ways to skin the cat (sorry Naima and BK :/) and I opted to go with one that would be practical + stylish + simple + easy to assemble. Personally, less is more with me - as a guest I'd like to know whats coming when, what the plans are for the food, and a small thank you for being able to make it. And that's all.

So I set out to create something that would be simple and stylish, not too labor intensive, and still fairly practical (as practical as programs are). Here's what I came up with:


What you're looking at is our single panel, double sided program. the program text is printed on white cardstock, and a slightly larger piece of teal is sandwiched imbetween. Please excuse those ugly blue blocks. I didnt think it was a good idea to put everyone's business out there (including the PHI's whole name), and I really wanted you to see the both sides and how they look on the teal.

Okay, since you were so good with the blue-blocked version, here's a blog-appropriate version of the text:


Before our programs, I'd never seen a program exactly like this. The next closest thing is probably a fan program - which I see all the time. In fact, if I had glued a stick between some of those layers, I could have had a fan. But considering the wedding is inside an AC venue, we did not need a fan. But I liked the concept very much and ran with it. When I did that, I knew that every inch of white cardstock was now prime real estate, and that we'd have to be strategic about what we included on (in, on?) the program.

The front features the PHI and I's full government names, the time and location, and the order of the ceremony. Following the ceremony order, there's a quick written thank you to our loved ones, and perhaps the most important tidbits of info: where to go for cocktails, and what time everyone can eat (lol). The only thing on the back is the bridal party - all 18 of them (19 if you include Godmommy who will be directing the rehearsal and the day-of activities).

Not shockingly, I used the same double border (dotted and solid), and fonts from the other paper-goods. Despite being in the same design family as every other piece of wedding paper, I really struggled with the program design. I like that the front is centered, but the back has a right justified title, and left justified text. I also really like how the green accents turned out. Less is definitely more, and I think the fact that only our names and a few headings are both green and script really helps organize the text and capture your attention.

As with the menus, I had the text printed at Office Depot on white cardstock. This time, to save some cash I found two coupon codes and had them printed in two batches. For 115 sheets (115 programs, front and back on 1 sheet), I spent about $60. The teal I got for a steal at Hobby Lobby. I was able to get 2 teal insides from a sheet and spent about $4. Throw in another $10 for adhesive and it brings the grand total for programs up to about $75. Not bad at all.

Assembly went much more smoothly as I learned my lesson from those blasted menus. I made sure that I had plenty of hands on deck and was able to knock them out over several glasses of wine and sangrias while 4 of my maids were in town for my Atlanta shower. I did all of the cutting, but BM Melissa and MdOH Dani did an awesome job making sure everything got glued together. Even the PHI got involved and helped to do some of the gluing. I was so proud. He was very careful with the materials (apparently I give off this anal vibe - lol) and did a really good job.

Sooo...I think thats all I had to say about the programs.

Oh wait, one more thing: Programs, Check!

♥

Are Ya Hungry?

If you weren't, you might be in a little bit. Cause I wanna show you our menus!


I can only take about half the credit for this project. For starters, it was all MamaP's idea. One day we were discussing paper-goods in general, things going on the table specifically, and she mentioned that she thought it would be nice to have something on the table describing the food. I thought she meant a few table tents with the menu on it, but no. She meant individual menus. And what did I do? I agreed to do them, only if I could design them.

MamaP's idea + my DIY muscle = an awesome team.

Here's what I came up with:


Ya'll know me, they were designed in PowerPoint and they had to match everything else. I was able to fit 3 on an 8.5x11 sheet, and had them printed at Office Depot. Since were planning for approximately 150 guests (!), I decided that I should outsource the printing to the professionals. It wasn't cheap, but it wasn't terribly expensive either. Plus, I couldn't beat submitting the order online first thing in the morning, and swinging by to pick them up when I got off of work. No sweat, tears or technical difficulties. (I spent about $30 on card stock, printing and peace of mind at Office Depot.)


To finish them off, I layered them over a slightly larger piece of Moss colored card stock from Paper Source. Again, I was able to get 3 back layers out of each sheet of 8.5x11 paper. Ever since I discovered Paper Source early into the wedding planning, I've been dying to find a reason to use them for our paper-goods. And now I have! (I spent about $15 on moss card stock.)

I am not going to lie. Assembling these suckers was an unbelievably huge pain in the arse. Thankfully, BM Naima agreed to come over and help me start them, and my cousins BM Melissa and Natalie helped me finish them this past weekend. Ladies, if you're reading this, thank you from the bottom of my bridal heart.

I know $45 is not bad for about 150 completely custom menus, but I do wish they'd come in a bit cheaper. Nonetheless, I loove how they turned out and I can definitely see why brides pay good money for other people to do this kind of stuff for them.

♥

Food for Thought: RSVPs (part two)

Earlier in part one, I talked about electronic RSVPs and why they are so appealing. But now I want to talk paper. And there is definitely some strong support for utilizing the USPS for wedding correspondence.

{yes, those are our current stack of RSVPs}
To some, electronic RSVPs are right up there will calling the couple to let you know they're attending. It just makes the whole responding process that much more casual. Which is fine if you're planning an informal wedding in a state park. But if you're going for a formal and elegant affair having people email their RSVPs doesn't exactly send a cohesive message about the formality of your wedding.

A related point is what to do about the senior citizens that might be attending (or planning to attend) your wedding. Both of my grandparents are octogenarians that don't email. However, one our guests, one of Granma's BFFs Miss Alyce does email, and she's well into her 80s. All that's to say that if your only options for RSVPs are electronic ones, its plausible you may have to make special concessions for your older (or non-tech savvy younger) guests. Not a deal breaker, but just something else to consider.

Paper RSVPs could also be a nice keepsake. One of our early RSVP designs had a space for guests to write a message to the PHI and I. I canned that for a more classic design, but I liked the sentiment behind including something like that. On a more practical note, I've also seen couples use that blank space on the RSVP card to obtain infromation about their guests plans for travel and accommodation. If you have alot of guests coming in from out of town and/or are coordinating their transportation from the ceremony to the reception site, having this kind of information as early as possible is invaluable.

Some critics argue that having a card mailed back is really old fashioned. Not just traditional, but old fashioned (negative connotation and all). And on this point, they're actually right. People have been using RSVP cards a looong time, all the way back to the days where written correspondence was the only way to correspond. Most people I know no longer send hand-written correspondence. They dont own any form of personal stationary, nor do they feel the need to send written notes for any reason other than graduations or weddings. Maybe its just me (cause I love stationary, especially if its personalized), but I think that's kinda sad. Im starting to feel like hand-written notes are becoming a lost art form.

I cant say that we struggled with the decision of what to do about our RSVPs. The PHI could care less and I knew right from the beginning that I wanted our invitation suite to include printed cards and envelopes. Personally, I love sending and recieving mail. So seeing a few of those 4Bar sized envelopes in our mailbox daily makes me immesely happy.

But that's me. And these are just some of my thoughts about RSVPs. At this point, I'm more interested in what ya'll think.

What are your thoughts on RSVPs? Is there a technological line to be drawn when it comes to weddings? Or does anything go?

♥

Paperless Post

What are your thoughts about rehearsal dinner invitations?

Personally, I look at them as another opportunity to send out cute invitations...and another non-budgeted line item. Yeah, I guess I feel two ways about them - lol.

But what about you? Any preconceived ideas about what they should look like?

Like I said, I always assumed ours would be paper - requiring a stamp and in a perfect world a rsvp so we'd know how many to expect at the mixer. Particularly since were inviting people outside of the bridal party. However, when I mentioned it to MamaP, she (long story short) assumed they were no big deal, and that we could send notification through email.

Email?
Email.

Up until recently, I would have openly balked at the idea. I mean seriously, how would you feel if you received a rehearsal mixer invitation over email? It would need to be done right, right? Well, what if it arrived looking like this:


This, dear readers is what you would see if your invitation or announcement was sent by Paperless Post. Paperless Post is a new-ish service that essentially sends digital invitations for a small fee (like $5 to send 60) that look like real ones. Ribbon embellishment and all (if you're into that like I am). Think of it as the Bently's of evites.


I like that I can "design" them one night, and send them out the same night. No need to have them printed, address envelopes, or hunt down stamps. And from what I gather, people can even rsvp for your event through the invite itself (like Evite).

I'm not sure I want to go the email route. And I'm not sure if I did I'd use Paperless Post. Part of me wants to have a little more control over what it looks like. Thankfully (I guess) we haven't nailed down all the details for the rehearsal and the rehearsal mixer, so I really have some time. Tomorrow, I wanna talk about another idea I have that involves emailing invitations.

But before I go, back to my original questions. What are your thoughts about rehearsal dinner invites? And what are your thoughts about receiving them through email?

♥

The Photo Sharing Experiment

Today I want to show you the results of a project that was a pain in my arse, but that I hope will yield some interesting results. In this day and age, most of the people I know have a digital camera surgically attached to their hand when they attend events. And I don't assume that my showers or the wedding will be any different. As such, I got this idea (probably off TheKnot or WeddingBee) to give guests the opportunity to share their digital photos with us. Lets call this "The Photo Sharing Experiment." And I'm going to use my wedding shower guests as my sample (sans informed consent, thank you!)

I designed these cute and instructional cards in PowerPoint (surprise surprise). Initially, I wanted to do business cards, but I was having a hard time uploading a business card size image to Vistaprint. So I made postcards instead. And found a coupon code to get 100 postcards for free. Postcards are significantly larger than a business card, but still small enough to slide in a purse. Maybe this larger size will mean they'll be less likely to end up in the deep recesses of a handbag (cause I assume everyone's handbag is as deep as mine - lol).

With postcards, you can never quite call which side you're going to see first. But technically, this is the side I expect people to see first:


Naturally, I used the wedding fonts, and for good measure I included our wedding website url. If I'm able to collect any good photos from my showers, I'll make a slideshow for the website. According to Vistaprint, this is the back. Black and white text was included for the back(I did have to pay to upload my image), so I made it black and white. The additional charge to print in color was not worth it.

This is the side I expect everyone to see second:


According to Vistaprint, this the front. So the color printing was included, but I still had to pay to upload my image. Here is where I outlined (hopefully) very simple instructions on how to upload photos to our Flickr site. I chose Flickr for this project for a couple of reasons. First, brides speak very highly of it for this particular purpose. Second, I used Flickr when I designed our Blurb guestbook, and could easily see making an additional photobooks using images guests uploaded. Flickr and Blurb are BFFs, so importing photos into the Blurb software is seamless and stress free.

Ya'll already know this experiment did not cost me very much. About $18, including the uploading fees and shipping. I really hope that the ladies at my shower will pick up a card and upload their photos. I'm not entirely sure this will work, but if people use them, I'm definitely going to order more for the wedding. Probably business card sized this time.

I'll let you know how my little experiment turns out, k.

♥

Please Save the Date

Now that I've confirmed that a fair number of our guests have gotten them, I'm finally ready to share our save the dates with you!


When I decided to make them myself, I knew that I wanted the fonts to be Century Gothic and Freebooter Script (to match the rest of the paper), that it would include our website address, assumed that it would be teal and kiwi in someway, and have our picture on it. I love that picture of us, and preferred it in black and white, so when I decided to use that photo, I just made the whole card black and white. I think that STDs can be a departure from the invites (especially since they are usually ordered before invites are fully decided upon) as long as they ultimately coordinate with the other paper-goods. Ours do, and I'll prove it...in due time.

I designed the cards in PowerPoint, converted the file to a pdf, and uploaded it to VistaPrint so I could get them for free. There is always some kind of promotion going on where you can get free stuff. I googled "VistaPrint free postcards" or something like that and found a code to get 100 postcards for free. All I had to do was pay the minimal image upload fee (it was like $2.50) and the shipping. Unless you need them yesterday, don't waste your money on the fast shipping. I selected the slowest (and cheapest) rate and got them in about a week and a half. Card printing and shipping: about $8.


To keep with the black and white design, I decided to mail them in black envelopes. I really wanted the envelopes with the Euro (triangle) flap, but these square "announcement" type were a little cheaper so I ordered 100 of those from envelopemall.com. Again, I selected the standard shipping rate. It was kind of expensive, but crazy fast. I think I got them like 2 or 3 days later. I was a little nervous about mailing the black envelopes, but I asked around and determined they should make it okay (they did). Envelope cost and shipping: about $17


I made these wrap around labels using my Xyron 510 sticker maker machine and plain ole copy paper. Designing the labels themselves was a little tricky. I made a table in Word, and then hid all the borders except for the outside one - which I made polka dotted. Then I cut and pasted my formatted table a gazillion times - I was able to fit about 5 labels to a sheet.

After all the labels were printed, I cut them and ran them through my Xyron. I love my Xyron. It doesn't require batteries and will turn almost anything into a sticker. Easy peasy wrap around labels. I purchased my Xyron ages ago, but hadn't used it for a project yet. I'm planning to use it for our favor tags, the programs, and possibly to make another set of wrap around labels for the wedding invites. Haven't decided how I'm going to address them yet. Wrap around labels: a little bridal elbow grease.

As I mentioned last week, to save some change on postage, a good number of the save the dates were hand-delivered. However, we did end up mailing about 40 of them. 40 stamps: $16.80


Here's the gang all ready for their trip to the mailbox.

I have to admit, initially I was against sending STDs. I thought it was a waste of paper and outside of our budget. The PHI felt very strongly about sending notification to our OOT guests and I told him that I would agree to them on one condition: that they'd cost us less than $1 each (I know, I can be awful). I'm so glad we sent them now. I think they are a lovely combination of chic and personal, and invoke the spirit of our wedding invites without being teal and kiwi green. You already know the best part: the price! Forty-two cents each! Couldn't beat that with a stick if I tried.

Are you planning on sending STDs? What qualities would you like yours to have?

♥

STDs Update

Not the diseases, but I dont think you'll like what I'm about to say very much either.

See, I had fully planned to share my save-the-dates (yes, thats what I meant by STDs - lol). But then I realized it was completely unfair to our guests. Its important to me that the recipients have a chance to oogle them before I share them with the Internet. MamaP hasnt even seen them yet!

Because you've been so patient, I will give you a little bit of insider info. This is the stuff that I've been cookin up in my little head that I haven't shared with the PHI yet. Uh huh, that kind of insider info.

1. They have these on them, but of course I had to put my stank on it (read: I created my own version and they're much cuter now).
2. The PHI didn't see them until after I ordered them. I know, bad girl. But thankfully he trusts my judgment.
3. Each one is about $.29 (card+envelope) before the stamp. Nope, not joking. Fab+ Cheap = Gotta love it.
   

I really hope its okay that I'm not unveiling them this weekend. The plan is to shoot them out 6 months before the RSVPs are due...March 1st. We can wait til then, right? In the meantime, I promise to prattle on about all kinds of other stuff to keep you distracted.

Cool...only about one more month to go.
♥

*take my word for it

Memo

TO: Everyone
FROM: Patti, Wedding President and CEO
RE: Downsizing

In an effort to ensure that the bride gets exactly what she wants we have had to let someone go. Effectively immediately, we will not be using a graphic designer to design wedding paper correspondence. If you have any further questions, feel free to contact Dani and she will be able to assist you.

PD

Yes, folks. I am in the process of letting my graphic designer go. I really like her, but honestly, working with her was not as fun as I thought it would be. It just felt too much like work (if that makes any sense at all). I was going to keep going because I committed myself to working with her (no contact though), until I decided to throw together some signage. As I was admiring my work, I realized I had some thoughts about the rest of of the paper goods. I knew I wanted our names in script, what the fonts would be, and that there would be minimal enclosures. I knew we wouldn't have a pocket fold. I knew the invites would be printed on white paper with a colored backing. I knew they would be kiwi and teal. Somehow.

Basically, I realized that I had a design in mind. And after pulling together that signage, fairly quickly, I knew I could do it. I'd already been doing research on envelopes and cardstock, so I basically needed to design, order the materials, have everything cut, and then assemble. Four steps. 6 months to get it done.

Sounded doable to me. And MamaP. And Dani. So were going forward. I still havent figured out all the specifics yet, but I know it will only cost me one stamp to mail them and that were doing a card (rather than a post card) for the replies. I'm also playing around with the idea of a an inner vellum envelope. The only small speedbump is what to do about our Save the Dates. I have a design in mind, but I dont think I have the proper software to put it in the correct format. I may get some help with that becasuse those suckers need to go out in the next 6 weeks or so (dont get me started on my lack of addresses to put on them). Other than that, I have a pretty solid plan of attack for our invites, and I cant wait to share them with you.

...and I know you're dying to see what I've come up with.
♥

2-getha 4-eva

Initially I was going to talk about this with the other website post, but I realized that even my most faithful readers were probably ready for me to hush. So today I wanted to (briefly) discuss an unexpected by-product of the website redesign. Yes, I have another reason to thank Ellie.

See, when we first started discussing fonts for the site, I was still firmly in the land of Scriptina - even when I started seeing it all over the place (most recently last night on a billboard for a new subdivision). Well, when I mentioned it, Ellie gently told me that it might be hard to read (even as titles) and that she had some suggestions for scripty/readable alternatives. One of the combos? You guessed it, Freebooter Script and Century Gothic (a Microsoft Word staple).

I didnt plan on making font changes. But when I saw them together on our website draft, I was sold. Now I cant imagine them not being an item. Yes, they're going to be together on everything!

Freebooter Script + Century Gothic
2-getha 4-eva

You've been warned.
♥