The Yays and the Nays

Our final head count is due to our caterer today, but we're ahead of the game! Because our guests are the kind, responsible sort, they returned their RSVPs promptly. The last of our RSVPs were waiting for us after our Mexico trip. It's taken me a little while to compose this post because I wanted to supplement the stats with pie charts. That's right. Pie charts!

The Yays and the Nays: Who's in
Total # of guests - 101
Yes responses - 85 (not including us)
No responses - 14

Nom nom nom

Excited squeaks from the peanut gallery

Excited phone calls and text messages started trickling in just a day after our invitations were mailed. The first RSVPs were just a day behind. Man, our local post office moves fast!

Mr. P emailed me this photo with the subject line: It has begun!

Invitation: Reveal!

Could this DIY have taken any longer? Probably not, if you ask Mr. PaC.

I started brainstorming ideas in October, experienced holiday-related delays, buckled down in January and was almost done until... I became a bee in February. Oops, productivity plummeted that month. Then I got the harebrained, but thankfully short-lived, idea to screen print the entire suite. (Which I still want to do.) I'm happy to announce that the invitation project is done at last!

Now that our paper babies are being delivered into the hands of their new owners, via the storks at the USPS, I can finally reveal the Pain au Chocolat invitation suite.

Are you ready for the big reveal?

Going Postal

Our invitation suite was created with money-saving features in mind. One of those features is using postcards for both the wedding and rehearsal dinner RSVPs. Did you know it's cheaper to mail a 4x6 postcard (28 cents) than a first-class letter (44 cents)? That saves us 16 cents on every mailed piece, or about $16. Yes, I'd like to save money. Please!

Herbs - the new 29 cent stamp
Knowing that a rate increase is coming smack-dab in the middle of our RSVP return period, we planned to purchase the new 29 cent stamps. The last thing I need is all of the RSVPs marked insufficient postage and returned to sender. However, the stamps do not go on sale until April 7th, about two weeks after I wanted to mail the invitations.

From the desk of...

Hive, have you ever decided you just had to have something for the wedding? I'm raising my hand here because I sure did. The item in question? A custom return address stamp. It all started when I stumbled across a custom stamp in Martha Stewart Weddings. I was smitten! But we were nowhere near ready to start on invitations, so I bookmarked it to revisit later.

source
Months later, our invitation suite was complete. I pulled up that old bookmark to show Mr. PaC. The cost made me pause. Sure, I liked the stamps but did I like them that much? So I did what any bride on a budget would do. I shopped around. Specifically for a stamp with fresh, whimsical calligraphy that we could reuse after the wedding.

The tiny print run that fell through the cracks

So here I am. All ready to print our invitation suite... *drums fingers on laptop* and none of the local printers have called me back. It's been three days and not a word. WTH, small businesses?

source
Printer #1 gave a phone quote last week, but the number/size of the printed pieces has since changed and I need a revised quote (plus I'm not sure the original quote was 100% accurate because it was so cheap). Hoping to expedite the quote/proof process, I uploaded the final files and job specs. It's been three full days and nothing. The turnaround time for this job? A day or two. Like most businesses, they're closed on the weekend so an answer will have to wait until Monday.

Completely enveloped

Our invitation suite is 90% done. Aside from assembling, weighing and purchasing postage, the only things that remain are sending the print job to the printer and selecting an envelope. (That sounds like way more after I typed it out.) The envelope samples I ordered arrived yesterday so we are one step closer.

We like yellow/gold for the outer envelopes but ordered some additional colors in our palette just to make the decision more difficult.


Meadow green, Tiffany blue, and lemon yellow from Paper and More are all fun, saturated colors and a medium paper weight that feels neither too thick (driving up postage) or flimsy. Mr. P liked the green the least and the blue isn't a true match to our palette. Still, it's nice to have options other than yellow.

invitation: save the date - reveal

Without further delay... the final reveal of the Pain au Chocolat save the dates.

Obvs, the names have been changed to protect the soon-to-be-wed
Sunshine yellow in a whimsical font!

We went through a few layout changes before Mr. decided enough was enough! The design was getting better in inches not miles. Mr. P was anxious to get them to our guests. I just needed to pick a design and go with it. So while this wasn't the most awesome STD we could have created, it's what we ended up with. Learning to let go or ahem, loosening my death grip on my quest for perfection.

The post office-savvy among you may have noticed these invites won't be the cheapest thing to mail. They're square. Ish. And what size are they anyway? Well, I'll let you in on a little secret... We never mailed them.

We emailed them! (Saving money? Check!)

Did you do anything unconventional with your STD or invitation suite?

invitation: save the date round 2

Not completely thrilled with the last batch of save the dates, I stepped away from it all for a few days. I was definitely feeling rusty... and blah. None of my sketched ideas were rockin' my socks; I knew the only way to get through the not-so-great ideas was to get them out of my system. And so begins the "Don't be a square, man" square designs.

Bold, simple and summery. And bor-ing.

invitation: save the date round 1

We've already established that I love yellow. It's a perfect color for our warm & sweet, playful summertime fete. Mr. P and I knew our invitations would be equally sweet and playful with lots of yellow for good measure.

If you compare the "look" of a wedding to a corporate identity (brand), you find many similarities. The tiny business card, containing the most information on the smallest piece of paper, is the starting point for the brand. The colors, fonts, shapes contained within it are then applied to everything else! Continuing the analogy... the Save the Date is the wedding version of a business card. It's your guests' first impression of the wedding, hinting at the merriment and joy to come!

The mood you convey here should be carried over into the rest of the paper suite (invitation, rsvp & more) and possibly even further into the decor itself. Which is why I had such a difficult time beginning. Design paralysis! To beat back the procrastination, I thumbnail sketched 40+ layouts before popping the simplest into Illustrator.

Begin with the basics: the date and request to save the date.*

See, a date and the words "save the date." 

invitation: inspiration

Whimsical. Bold. Hand-lettered. Vivid. Cut paper. Preppy patterns. Negative space. Unusual. My tastes in invitations are no shrinking violet.

In preparation for designing our invitation suite, I gathered all the images I'd pooled during our long engagement in search of similarities in style and color. Anything to help synthesize what felt like disjointed ideas into something coherent!

Here's a collection of inspiring invitations that speak to my artistic soul:


Bold, summery invites from ohsobeautifulpaper.com
I could eat up the pattern on the Save the Date. Digging the trio of colors for the invitation suite. Hand-stamped program covers and table numbers are a more affordable way to achieve the letterpress look. And yellow!!