Last year, I probably spent a good solid month hunting for my "perfect" invitations. I knew I wanted the pocket style with inserts but I couldn't find anything that was just right. Well, then I found some that I liked but they were about $10/EACH!!! No thanks, plus, it was basically paying someone to do what I could easily do myself. I came up with the design LAST JULY and for some crazy reason waited til the last possible minute to get these babies together and ready to send out. I knew I wanted guests to have at least 8 weeks to make their travel arrangements which put me in a major time crunch, not to mention, I spent two weeks back to back on the west coast for work at the beginning of April. OH and throw in a trip to West Virginia for Easter and per-marrital counseling. I figured out how many sheets of each paper/envelopes I needed to order and ordered everything from Paperandmore.com. LOVE that site. That's where I also got the paper for the wedding programs from. I checked out 3 different printers in the Cleveland/Chattanooga area and settled on Splendid Printing in Chattanooga - he was the only printer that did thermographic (raised) printing plus I felt that he BEST understood what I wanted. He even cut each of the cards down to size for me -- I got to watch him cut the paper and I think I lost a few years off my life each time the cutter sliced through the stacks of my paper. Everything was exact on the measurements though!
I dropped off all the paper/envelopes for him to print and cut and headed to CA for a quick business trip. When I got back, I was able to pick everything up BUT we had company for about 5 days so everything got put in the closet until I had time to deal with it!
Then, on the Sunday that everyone left, I got to work. Well, I tried to anyway. Here's my wonderful attempt to mass produce about 130 invitations. I think I got MAYBE 5 done that day? Then, we had 2 more out of town visitors, so back to closet everything went.
So fast forward to Thursday, MY BIRTHDAY, and the day that my mom and grandma were coming into town (we went to Vegas for another work trip for me on Friday). So what did any loving daughter do? I put those ladies to WORK! We had an assembly line going! Earlier in the week my wonderful sweet amazing husband had cut all the ribbon and that part was ready to go! I glued the invite card to the silver backer with my ATG gun, inserted the cards into the pocket and then attached the ribbon once Mom had the rhinestone buckle and ribbon creased. Interesting side note -- the buckles were the first thing I purchased for the wedding! Once I finalized my invite design last year I began the hunt for pretty rhinestone buckles in bulk. I found these on etsy (LOVE that site)! Granny was busy putting the return stamps on my RSVP envelopes and the two on the main envelope. The final touch was my embossed return label on the back flap of the invitation. I wanted something that I could use after we were married so I opted out of getting our name/my name on it. We finished up well after midnight but we finished!! Mom and I took them to the post office down in Chattanooga where a lady had told us she would hand cancel them (my greatest fear was that the postage meter would eat them!!!).
While we were in Vegas, just a few days after mailing our invites, my friends starting sending pictures as they received! Such a fun thing and I was tickled pink to see that the envelopes weren't damaged in the mail.
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