Hardcore DIY Invites (Part 5)

The final week of invitation assembly was, I won't lie, grueling. It was still loads of fun, and really not much work in relation to the value of the product, and I don't regret a minute of it. But yes, it was hard.

On Monday night, when we first got back from Vermont, I put the finishing touches on files for printing. That's pretty light lifting. But the second night, I stayed late at the office to make uninterrupted use of the laser printers to print the response cards and inserts. When I got home, I then cut them all down to their rectangular sizes: exact quarter pages for the response cards, and a variety of sizes for the inserts. I also began cutting the inserts down to trapezoids from the rectangles. See inserts on the left (though the photo actually shows all of the inserts after they've been cut into trapezoids).

On Wednesday, I was able to confirm (slightly earlier than anticipated) the start time of our event with the venue, so printed the invite fronts (again staying a bit late so as to have uninterrupted use of the work laser printer). Upon arriving home, I cut those into rectangles slightly smaller than a quarter page and also cut the majority of the inserts into their proper shapes. At this point, I called in the cavalry (mom and little sister) who would be coming to my assistance on Friday night. Being the total control freak that I am, I wanted to finish as much of the "finer" work as I could, to ensure that if anything was going to be irrevocably messed up, it would be messed up by me.

So Thursday night, I attached all of the vellum invite fronts (see left), numbered all of the response cards (and wrote-in the number invited, as you'll see later) according to the ordered guest list, and addressed all 60-odd envelopes, pairing them to their respective response cards. You may or may not know this trick, but you number the response cards so that if someone doesn't put a return address on their response envelope, if they forget to fill in the "names of attending" line, or if they just write illegibly, you still know whose response you've received.

As flashy as we wanted to be with the invites, I've already mentioned the ways I've managed to conserve paper in the construction, and we didn't want to go the inner-envelope route. So the names of those invited were written directly on the sapphire blue envelopes in silver ink. It may be worth noting that I got a total of about 6 silver pens and markers, compared them all in regards to ease of writing and silver tone, and then selected the favorite to address all invitations.

On Friday, mom checked my envelopes against the guest list to be sure I'd gotten everyone's names and addresses right while little sister and I put stamps on all of the response envelopes, put my address labels on the front of the response cards, and inserted the inserts into the die-cuts on the back of the invites (see left). When mom was done checking against the list, I re-addressed a few envelopes that I'd done a bit too close to the bottom of the envelopes while she started inserting inserts, and little sister put return addresses on the back flap of the well-addressed sapphire envelopes.

At the time, I was under the impression that the invites would need 59 cents of postage to mail, so I figured I'd spring for the 63 cent stamps that would match my envelopes. They didn't have those at the post office I had tried, so they would be the last step of the process.

On the left is that response card I mentioned earlier. We could have added many more questions for our guests to answer (where will you stay, when are you arriving, enter your email to be added to the mailing list, what is your quest, etc), but the more blanks, the more complicated it is, and the greater the likelihood of someone not filling it out correctly. The line that reads "Yes, ___ of ___ will be attending" is designed for us to fill in the second blank letting them know how many people are invited (in case the front of the envelope wasn't clear enough) and for the recipient to fill in the first blank saying how many are attending. This discourages people from writing in more guests than were invited. As we've already found, it doesn't stop them from wishing for more guests or from asking for more, but at least they have an idea of how futile their request is.

Response numbering, pretty stamps and our address labels on the response envelopes. They actually matched the silver of the envelopes better than it looks in the photo.







Here, the whole invitation suite stacked up: the response card tucked into the flap of the envelope, behind the invite, facing the back flap. Basically any way you pull it out, you shouldn't get pieces falling all over the place.



When the invites were done, stuffed and nested into their envelopes, I insisted on pulling them all back out and checking to be sure the numbers on the RSVPs lined up with the names on the guest list, because I'm just that crazy. I would absolutely not permit little sister to start sealing them up until after I checked the invite process I'd put together. And, to make a long story even longer, on Monday morning when I was ready to leave the house with my un-stamped invites to go to work and the post office, I somehow realized that I'd misspelled the last name of someone in my wedding party. It was a near thing, and Fiance offered to re-check all of them against the list (which was right) in the evening, but I managed to let it go.

So, to the post office they went, where the nice man informed me that they weighed exactly 1.00 ounces and I had to rethink my entire stamp strategy. The next day, people started receiving them, and two days after that, we got our first RSVP in the mail. Yay!

Who knew I had this much to say about the finalization of the invites? Wedding web site will have to come next.