You're Cordially Invited

Well, not really, although I really would love to meet some of the ladies behind the blogs I read on a daily basis. My fiancée thinks it’s funny how I refer to your blogs – I’ll say, “you know (insert blog title here) said this today,” or “(insert blog title here) went to this really cool place last weekend.”

Either way – the finished invitations were hand delivered to my parent’s home when I was there two weekends ago and I was so excited to see the finished product and it certainly did not disappoint.

When we first started our quest for finding the perfect invitation we perused the huge 20-pound sample books from designers like William Arthur, Vera Wang, and Martha Stewart. While I found a few invitations that I liked I thought that everything looked very generic and I wasn’t all that impressed with the papers/colors used.

My mom ended up coming across someone locally that does personalized engraving, thermography, and general printing services. In fact, she’s actually the one who does all of the paper products for many of our state Senators. We stopped by her place one weekend when I was home and I immediately knew that these were the invites for our event! The paper alone is SO beautiful – it’s heavy without being too thick and it’s the perfect creamy color. The best part of the stock that we chose is that the edges are gilded and the corners are rounded. I love them!

Now if you’re a soon-to-be bride or if you’ve already been a bride than you know how expensive all of the different printing techniques can be. The engraved route is beautiful, but also typically the most expensive. A metal plate is made replicating the information that you want on your invitation and that is then pressed into each card. You’ll know if you receive an engraved invitation because you can literally see an imprint on the back of the card as well as feel the writing raised on the front of the card.

Thermography is a bit different – you’ll know if an invitation is printed using the thermography technique by the feel of the front of the invite. While there is no imprint on the back of the card, the “ink” will be raised on the front of the card.

We ended up doing a combination of both of these techniques. The woman that we worked with created a custom duo-gram – an A and an M on one plate and our names for the invite on another plate. These two parts of our invitation are engraved. **It’s also nice because we get to keep the plates for any future stationary or ‘thank you’ notes that we may want to have printed with the duo-gram** The rest of the invitation was done in thermography. We ended up deciding on using a combination of gold and black. The engraved pieces (which you can’t see because these are the digital mock-ups of our invites) are done in a beautiful shimmery gold and the rest is thermography-ed in black.

In addition to the main invitation we included a reply card & envelope and a “dinner and dancing” card – both were thermography-ed in black and included the same gilded edges found on our main invitation card.

We had each envelope addressed in calligraphy (you can see the beautiful calligraphy in the picture above!) and used the wedding cake stamp on the main envelope and the gold rings stamp on our reply card envelopes because it fit with our “look”.

So…on Sunday and Monday evening my mom and dad got to work stuffing, and stamping each invitation. I love these photos that my mom sent to me of my dad working on the invites. Also note the glass of wine nearby! There was a lot to do, but they got them finished and in the mail on Tuesday morning which means that many of our guests have already received them! In fact, we've already had a few people call and comment on how beautiful they turned out! Also, I noticed this in the “Out Mail” box in my office today – a reply card all ready to go from my lovely boss – so efficient!