RSVP Already!

So our RSVPs are due today and there are at least 12 people who have still not responded, including some family members. Frustrating! Planning a wedding has given me a whole new perspective on weddings...I will never RSVP late again. So much stuff depends on headcount; we feel a bit paralyzed until folks respond.

I was dismayed to find out that some invitations went missing in the mail. I hope the folks who didn't get their invites while other family members did weren't hurt by our apparent lack of inclusion...well, they know now that we sent them, anyway. And the invitations are so awesome that I feel annoyed at the post office for not delivering them. ;-) Here's the top of our lovely invite (I cropped out all the wording, sorry!).


We decided not to do the craters, which we were going to do as blind letterpress, but they look awesome even without them. Didn't Mr. T do a good job? Although two of my friends have commented that he should've made my boobs bigger! Ha!

Even with all the unknown replies, Mr. T and I have worked out a rough seating chart already. We did this when we were at dinner on Saturday. Pretty much any time we're together we're talking about wedding crap. I look forward to the day when we become interesting people again!

OMG OMG Invitations are Done! OMG!

This morning I needed to drive into work (instead of taking the train like I typically do) because my dance troupe has a gig tonight. As Mr. T and I got ourselves into the car (late as usual), my phone rang, with an unfamiliar number. I was worried that it was our landlord, so I made Mr. T listen to the voicemail as I drove. It was our invitation printer, saying our invites were done and ready to pick up! Well, you can guess that we took a little detour on the way to work and got those suckers in our hot little hands! They look magnificent and I am SO excited about them.

However, I am not excited that apparently these have been done for awhile and just sitting around and no one called us. That pretty much blows any idea of doing custom postage (we needed to wait until we had the invites done to weigh them, so we could find out what the postage would be). I shouldn't be so whiny and bridezilla about it, but the stamps currently available are just so ugly. Mr. T and I are both a little unenthused about using The Simpsons, gold wedding bands (blech!), or the liberty bell on our beautiful black envelopes with silver writing. The Edgar Allen Poe stamp from last year was amazing, but it's now outdated and they haven't released a new one with the new postage rate.

Oh, well, you can't win them all.

It also changes the trajectory of our weekend. We have to finish addressing envelopes and get these suckers in the mail!!! Luckily our return address stamp came in this week too.

Invitations to Printer: Check! Plus, other random tasks

I'm so happy to report that we sent the invite files to the printer yesterday and dropped off the black paper this morning before work. Hooray! That is such a weight lifted. We were ecstatic after uploading the files yesterday.

Also, the printer has already sent us a PDF proof of our invite. That was fast! The owner told Mr. T that they were in a lull at the moment, so the printing might only take about 2 weeks. Hooray! That means, if we have some time to spare, that we can consider doing custom postage through Zazzle or a site like that, to coordinate with our invitations. If we use the post office's postage, we're stuck with some not-so-thrilling options, but we'll suck it up if we have to. I just wish they'd updated the Edgar Allen Poe stamps with the new rate...sigh.

This weekend we also accomplished a few other wedding tasks:

• We made our registries live on our wedsite. We haven't added flatware yet, but we can do that later.
• We tried two more rehearsal dinner options. This is turning out to be much more challenging than finding the wedding venue! To summarize, the Vietnamese place closest to our venue sucks, so we're looking at opening our search to restaurants without private rooms.
• We purchased a custom return address stamp from Etsy.
• We booked our hotel room for our wedding night, plus our photographer's hotel room for two nights.
• We ordered our cupcake stand (cardboard, to be painted and adorned by us).
• We purchased gifts for my bridesmaid and MOH as well as our officiant.
• I purchased a wedding band for Mr. T from an online jeweler...luckily we can return it to the company if he hates it.
• We purchased envelopes for our invitations, with extras for thank you notes. We also decided that lining the envelopes wasn't worth the hassle, so that's another thing off my list.
• We put some thought into our first dance and decided what we're going to do (but I'm not telling!)
• I scheduled my first dress fitting for this Friday! This is when I try on the muslin version. After that they order the fabric and get to work!
  

Phew! Only another 120 things to go!

Double-Digits

93 days left! I think I just started to hyperventilate a bit. Holy crap.

I'm still alive, obviously. I went to Hawaii to teach and perform and also vacation for a bit, and am now back in the chilly Bay Area, still groggy from the time change, and unable to wear any of the nice summer clothing I bought that actually fits me!

I did completely blow off the diet for a week, and haven't weighed myself yet, so who knows how I did in that regard. I'm afraid to know!

In news of wedding things achieved, Mr. T bought his suit. Luckily for us, he liked the suit they had in stock at Sak's, so he's going to have that one altered to fit him a little better, and only the vest will need to be custom.

We are almost done with the invitations and will probably get them off to the printer in the next few days. What a relief. We are probably not going to do any blind letterpress after all, but I'm not disappointed. Once I got to have black paper, true happiness was achieved. ;-)

We still need to settle the matter of the rehearsal dinner venue fairly soon. So much to do, so much to do!

Invitation Update

The printer says we can do black paper! Yay! and I've found some that won't break the bank, so we're still under budget. I'm learning all about paper--pounds versus gsm, and how cover stock is different. I think this might actually help me with my day job!

Now that we know we can do black paper with silver type, Mr. T's gotten re-inspired about the invites (again) and has gone in a new direction--we're no longer just doing a type design. This weekend he was working on a monogram for us with little success and a lot of cursing. It's funny, we've both come full circle with what we wanted for invites at the very beginning of our engagement: I wanted black paper, and he wanted a silhouette of us against a moon, with our two cats and a big tree. Last night he went home and worked some more on the invite with that in mind and I have to say, it's looking really good! I felt very positive about us achieving this one. Phew!

We still want to do some blind letterpressing as part of the design, and that may prove tricky, but we'll deal with that when we come to it...

Invitation Frustration

So, the clock is ticking, and we have no invitations.

Mr. T and I have finally conceded defeat regarding our previous invitation idea. It's too difficult for us to do on our own, and too expensive for us to contract out, and on top of that, the letterpress printer seemed dubious that we could even do print it the way we'd like to, so we're back to the drawing board (tick, tock, tick tock!).

There's an amazing letterpress blog, Beast Pieces, that Mr. T and I have been stalking, so we went there for inspiration (well, and I went to about 300 other sites too, but I figure you don't want to see all the rejects here!).

Here's our new plan:
1. Black paper. This makes me very happy as I have wanted black paper all along. I love the idea of it.
2. Silver ink. Apparently white ink doesn't letterpress on black paper well, but metallics do. Again, awesome.
3. Blind debossing. Mr. T feels confident that he can create a nice border and pattern for the edges of the paper, and we'll have our text centered in the middle. Simple, elegant, and still unique.

I've sent off some questions to the printer about this new plan and am hopeful that they'll say it's all good...next step will be to research paper stock (our printer doesn't carry black, of course!). Mr. T feels a lot better and less stressed about this plan, and therefore, so do I.

Here are some inspiration pix from Beast Pieces:

Love the blind-debossed pattern:


Another example of blind debossing:


More blind debossing. I ADORE this card!



Cross your fingers for us!!

Invitation Inspiration

On Friday night I printed out samples of a bunch of free fonts I'd downloaded off the interweb, mostly from Dafont.com. There was a great Edward Gorey one in there that I loved...we might use that font for the insert, but not for the wedding invitation itself.

For the invite, I had also printed out a bunch of posters from this one site; they were all hand-inked and hand-lettered (no computers involved! Crazy!). Mr. T loved them as much as I did and started drawing an invitation loosely based on the posters. Gotta love that art school education! Here are some of our inspirations:







Amazing, right? I can't wait for our invitations to be done. This was a nice antidote to the practicality of the Knot checklist blues; I needed something to push me back into being excited, rather than overwhelmed!

I talked to our invitation printer today and they put a little bit of a damper on my high spirits...it seems these are going to be tricky to letterpress (when they started saying technical mumbo-jumbo like "double-bump" I tuned out a little. Mr. T can deal with that). Not impossible, but tricky. We're stubborn, though, so we're going to see it through! I have faith in our stubborness. :-)

And for fun, I'll add a Hello Lucky! Halloween card that we also really like:


Our goal with these designs is to increase the wedding/love related imagery and decrease the creepy/gore/devil related imagery, in order to hopefully find a nice Hallowedding balance that won't cause our relatives to call in an exorcist. That would put a damper on the ceremony. Or, it would be really, really funny, but still, it's probably best avoided.

Beautiful Invitations

I think I found these through WeddingBee. First, from local letterpress Hello, Lucky!, a SF-based invite:


So cute! I wish they had a Berkeley one. I noticed that Hello, Lucky! is now doing digital printing, a much more affordable option. But sigh, I love the letterpress.

Second, a woodcut (lasercut?) invite:



I LOVE this one. However, the bride admitted she went through a Hong Kong vendor who couldn't speak English, so I don't think these invites are in my future. But I covet them.

It's a really good thing I wasn't a math major

You may remember this post, where I accidentally calculated that we would need $3600 in postage. Yep, not the best at math over here, I admit it.

Today I finally went through and counted the number of households, not guests, that are on the current invite list, and came up with 55. Here I was thinking we were inviting 100 people, so we'd need 125 invites, but actually, we're going to need to order 75 invites, and that should cover it. Phew. That makes letterpress look a lot more affordable.

I'm such a dork. At least I do eventually figure these things out, even if it takes me awhile.

Sigh.

Still Lovin' the Letterpress

I can't remember where I found these, but I love them. I love the literary allusion, the text "sea," and the kitty and the owl. So sweet.

Ironically, the letterpress place I found in our town seems like our cheapest option, period, thus far. Even if we DIY'd the invites, the Gocco machine itself is $200, and then we'd need to buy paper and envelopes. Unless we used the machine a lot, it seems to make more sense to skip the Gocco and get our invites professionally printed.

DIY is not always cheaper! I feel vindicated.

Letterpress-OUCH!

So, I was right--I've been looking up letterpress pricing and most places run between $1100 and $1300 for the quantity that we would need. YIKES. And that's just invites, reply cards, and envelopes. No ribbons, inner envelopes, or other embellishments.

That Etsy vendor is looking more reasonable, although honestly, $700 still seems crazy to me.

I did find one letterpress vendor that has done letterpress printing since 1946 (!) that was more reasonable, mainly because they do it with polymer plates instead of lead type, so it's a slightly different process than traditional letterpress. Their stuff still looks beautiful though, for example:



The absolute cheapest (one color of ink, completely blank envelopes) would be $400. Also, it would mean we would have to go with white or cream stock, which I didn't initially want to do--I was thinking orange stock with black ink.

Two ink colors, blank envelopes, would be $630. It's worth considering, I suppose. Also, they are local to us, so we could even go pick them up if we're allowed--no shipping costs!

As I was looking I found these great letterpress Halloween cards from local vendor "Hello Lucky!". Mmmletterpress. The second is a great way to make the most of one ink color, I thought.

The Invites--to DIY, or not to DIY

I don't mind a certain amount of DIY. I'm not the most crafty person, but Mr. T went to art school, so I think we could pull off designing and printing our own invites on our own printer at home. Mr. T is worried that they will look terrible. I guess I can't fault him for being concerned.

Still, finding premade Halloween wedding invitations is pretty much not going to happen. I actually did find one vendor, but they were in the U.K. and I didn't love their stuff.

We both love the look of letterpress printed stuff, but my initial research has been discouraging--I found one vendor on Etsy that charges $700 just for 100 invites. I will keep pricing, but that first amount doesn't make me feel very confident about affordable letterpress invites. But, you never know.

In my googling I did find some adorable DIY invites. I love the look of the inside of this first one:

It looks all Edward Goreyesque, which I love. I also love the white type on the black background. I'm not as crazy about the Hardy Boys front cover. Mr. T says it's obvious that they pasted the invitation together and says it looks cheap to him. I don't mind the pasted together look so much, but I'm not a graphic designer. I also found these:


I think this is from Better Homes and Gardens. I like the look of the vellum, and I like the font they used too. I haven't shown it to Mr. T yet, so I don't know if this is an approved font or not. I was joking with Mr. T that we should use Comic Sans or Papyrus for our fonts, trying to keep my best poker face on so he'd think I was serious, but he knew I was kidding. I guess 10 years of dating helps you to know stuff like that. Mr. T is very opinionated on the subject of fonts. An Italian restaurant opened up in our neighborhood and printed their very cheap looking sign using Papyrus...when they went out of business, he snorted, "well, no wonder!" (As an aside, if you haven't seen the documentary "Helvetica," and you are at all interested in books, typesetting, or graphic design, you should check it out.)

I also found some just plain old Halloween invitations, which we could have customized with our own text. I liked this one:



I like the simplicity, with just the black and orange. Perhaps it's too Halloween and not enough wedding, though? The bonus is, these are cheaper--$200 for the quantity we'd need. However, it doesn't include a reply card. I suppose we could do our own, just on orange cardstock (although that presents the problem of matching the oranges...). I also thought about having all the reply cards be vintage Halloween postcards, something like this:


We could get books of postcards and each invite would have a different postcard. Of course, we'd still need to print on the backs.

Mr. T would like to have one of our artist friends draw something for the front--do a totally custom invite--but I'm not sure yet where we could get those printed or how much those would cost. There are machines for home printing--almost like silkscreening--called Gocco, but they are hard to find and set up costs would be $200 or so, plus paper expenses and ink, etc. I like the looks of the ones I've seen, but I'm not convinced it would be cheaper, or that it would look good in my noncrafty hands...I guess Mr. T would be assigned silkscreening duties.

I mused aloud the other day that I'm considering taking a calligraphy class, to address our invites. Now, I know I could just address them myself in my normal handwriting and that would be fine. (Unless, of course, you're reading one of those wedding magazines that admonishes you, "Get your invites to the calligrapher early!" The calligrapher??? I priced this, just out of curiosity, and it would cost us about $5 an invite. Ouch!) But, I have plenty of time, and I think the calligraphy would be a nice touch with the Halloween theme. Also, I could do signage for the reception in calligraphy. Mr. T surprised me by saying he'd taken a class when he was a kid and that he'd be into taking another one with me. I guess there are still things to find out about your partner after 10 years! So, we might do that.

I'll do a separate post on Save the Date cards...those will be easier, once we get a venue, that is.