Tuesday, April 5, 2011

You're Invited! (Probably)

Sunday evening I put my fiancé, my parents, and my future mother-in-law to work in an assembly line. It was time to break out the box of invitations, response cards, and pre-addressed envelopes we'd ordered six months prior, and I knew it would be no small task.

(My mom never fails to have her "stoic and creepy" look in photos.)
Piles and lists, piles and lists
An enthusiastic... um, licker...
When I first started dreaming of invitations soon after our engagement, I assumed that we'd hire a calligrapher to address them in ink made of white gold (okay, not quite). However, as we began weaving all of the pieces of a wedding together, and budgeting (and re-budgeting) our money, invitations quickly soared to the bottom of our list--we decided we'd be doing those on the cheap.


Then, I began pricing vendors recommended to me by friends, from theknot.com, on Etsy, even materials to make our own from Paper Source, and realized that the $600 I had set aside was not even going to cover the invitations at any of these places, let alone the response cards, the envelopes, the stamps, etc.


Finally, I stumbled across 123print.com. Now, I will forewarn all of you (including those who will be receiving an invitation in their mailbox later this week), don't be expecting one of those fancy shmancy styles with ribbons and tissue paper, blah blah blah. But I was pleased with 123print for the following reasons:
  1. Their huge selection of colors, styles, and themes. I'd had a heck-of-a-time finding a modern-looking, not-too-girly, summer-y, pink-and-orange choice at any of the other places I'd looked. But on this site I immediately found 3+ options that would mesh well with our wedding vibe. We finally ending up deciding on the Watch Love Grow style with coordinating response cards, rehearsal dinner invites, etc.
  2. They let you design all the wording, the font, the placement of the text, etc. at no additional charge. So many of the other invitation vendors had disclaimers listed like "$0.50 per invitation for an extra line of text" or "limited monograms available" etc. But at 123print.com, you design the whole thing from your personal computer on their extremely user-friendly website.
  3. The prices! Wowwwweeeee! The envelopes are free, the shipping is free, it's fabulous! I'm just gonna lay it all out there for ya: We ordered 300 invitations with 300 matching envelopes, 300 response cards with 300 matching pre-addressed envelopes, and 50 rehearsal dinner invitations with... matching envelopes... for (drumroll please...) $165.74. This obviously kept us eons below our budgeted amount, which is now allowing us to splurge on professional floral arrangements for our reception centerpieces. (I know, I know... you're remembering this post where I detailed our homemade centerpiece idea. More on why we've changed our minds later...)
So, they're sent. The (Probably) part of my post title comes from the fact that we were originally told that our reception hall holds 250 people MAX. So, when we were sending out 300 invitations (inviting almost 400 people in all! (oops)), we starting joking about how we would have to call and "un-invite" people if we didn't get enough "no" responses. Don't think we're asking you to decline, though, because after meeting with our banquet coordinator last night, we've learned that there will be plenty of space to accommodate a larger crowd. Phew!

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