operation: invitations

Lately the thing that people always tend to ask me is, "how's wedding planning going? Do you have a lot done"? Truthfully, I'm not sure how to answer that question. We have most of the big things done, I guess, but WEDDING! still seems so big, so immense. The things that are left kind of scare me, in part I think because I feel like there are a thousand things I'm forgetting. I really don't know how we're going to do all the food and make it work, but I'm trying not to worry about that and leave that (for now) to Bear and his mom. Right now, the most pressing thing I need to get to is designing our wedding invitations (and then printing and assembling them). I might be a glutton for punishment. Anyway, the (pretty!) envelopes and the flat cards that I ordered arrived last week and have been sitting on my dining room table waiting to be turned into something worthy of going out into the world. Our save the dates took so. much. work. It was extremely tedious at times, but in the end it was worth it and I'm incedibly proud of them. I hope that I am at least equally proud of my... er, our invitations. I suppose I should share some photos of our save the dates as a reference point, but for the time being I'll just say that I used navy envelopes and addressed them in silver pen. We also embossed a flower stamp over the flap. They turned out really nicely and we got quite a few compliments on them.

For our invitations, I ordered dark blue shimmery envelopes which will also be addressed in silver. However, because apparently it's NOT OKAY to include a return address, at least not on the front of the envelope, I ordered an address stamp from etsy. We'll emboss this in silver over the envelope flap. Of course, I'll only be able to use this stamp for two more months until we get the hell out of dodge, which makes me sad, but in this case I decided it was best to just bite the bullet. I found a stamp that would fit the narrow-ish straight flap on our envelopes, with a design that I loved and will go with our overall paper scheme. It will also save me a lot of time (since I won't have to hand-write our return address on all of our envelopes) and energy (since I won't have to worry about offending Emily Post's ghost). So, it will be worth it. I'll order another one with our new address once we have said new address and I've changed my name, post-wedding. That was one other thing I liked about this stamp; it only has our first names on it. I figure that since we sent save the dates to all our guests, they ought to know who "Sara & Charles" are, and if not, they'll know once they look at the actual invitation. I should hopefully receive the stamp right around Easter, and I was hoping to get the invites out at the end of April/beginning of May, so that works out well.

If only I didn't have a more-than-full-time job and could do arts and crafts all day...