Rowling Declines with Regret

Being as nerdy as I am, I decided to "invite" some celebrities to our wedding.

I got this is the mail yesterday - our first celebrity RSVP.  

Here's a list of our VIP's and their mailing addresses in case you'd like to invite them to your next special event!  Also, I'll be sure to keep you posted as the responses arrive.

J.K. Rowling
C/O Scholastic Books
555 Broadway
New York, New York
10012

Mr. and Mrs. Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
20500

Her Majesty The Queen
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA

Walt Disney World
Guest Letters
Letters to Mickey Mouse
P.O. Box 10040
Lake Buena Vista, Florida
32830

Walt Disney World
Guest Letters
Cinderella and Prince Charming
P.O. Box 10040
Lake Buena Vista, Florida
32830

RSVP Arrival

After sending out our invitations the other day, I couldn't wait for the RSVP's to start filling up the mailbox.  We received our first RSVP this past Saturday (only 3 days after the invites went out!) and we received several more today - it's so exciting!

In total, we ended up inviting 149 guests to the wedding.  According to a statistic that I read in my Brides magazine, about 85% of guests RSVP 'Yes'.  I'll keep you posted and find out how accurate that 'fun fact' is.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Good news:  invitations officially went out yesterday!

Bad news:  we had to spend way more than we had anticipated on postage.  :-(
After assembling an entire mock invitation, we weighed the invite on a digital home scale - exactly 1.0 ounces.    PERFECT!  So, we moved forward and assembled everything and had it ready to go.  We went to the post office to buy stamps and send the invites on their way.  The worker suggested weighing one invite just to be sure because they looked heavy.  It turns out that our invitations weighed 1.05 ounces!!!!  That meant we had to jump up to the $0.65 postage for each one.

Moral of the story:  Don't trust your scale at home.  Bring your mock invite to the post office.  We could have easily rearranged and cut things down to get down to the 1 ounce mark and we would have saved $0.19 per invitation.


Ending on a positive note:  INVITATIONS ARE DONE AND IN THE MAIL!  Now time to wait patiently for the RSVPs.

What to Know about Wax

We ordered our wax for our invitations from scrapbooking-warehouse.com.  I just want to say that after finishing our invitations, I am very pleased with how well the wax worked.  When the wax first arrived, I was concerned that we didn't have enough because the sticks looked SO small.

We had ordered 3 packs of 6 sticks for a total of 18 sticks.  We only used half of the sticks after doing 85 invitations correctly and messing up on about 5 - so 90 total.  So, we actually ended up getting about 10 seals (twice as many as we had thought) from each stick.  This is what our seals looked like (they were each about the size of a quarter).



To simplify things: one stick of wax from that website got us 10 quarter-sized wax seals.

We're just going to use the extra and seal our Thank You cards since we had so much fun working with the wax on the invitations!

Envelopes Arrived

Our outer envelopes have arrived.  We ordered them from Jampaper.com this Saturday (2 days ago), it was processed on Monday (yesterday) and arrived today - talk about awesome service.  They were packed very nicely and arrived in perfect condition.  I could not have been happier.

Side note:  As you know, I ordered my free samples of envelopes from envelopesexpress.com.  I ordered my sample in Dark Purple and it was a perfect match.  However, Jampaper.com was cheaper, but didn't offer free samples.  They also offered Dark Purple envelopes, so I decided to just to for it and order without seeing  sample.  The Dark Purple envelopes from both sites were identical.  I don't know if this is always the case, but it worked out in this situation.

Signed and Almost Sealed

If you remember, the fiance and I decided we would be adding wax seals to our invitations.  After some searching, I found the best deal on the wax sticks online.  Beware, if you are looking for any color other than white, gold, or silver, you will not find wax sticks in stores, you'll need to buy it online.

Anyway, we ordered out wax sticks from scrapbooking-warehouse.com.  Each pack of sealing wax comes with 6 sticks.  I've read on average (and airing on the safe side) you should assume that each wax stick will give you 5 seals. Based on this we went with 3 packs, which only cost us $29 including shipping!  I can't wait for it to get in, so we can finish up these invitations.

Also, from what I've read you can use these wax sticks in just a regular sized hot-glue gun.  We will see how that works out and I will keep you posted!

Outer Envelopes Ordered

After considering my option for outer envelopes I decided to go with jampaper.com.  After you find them on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, they offer you a $5 off $25 or more purchase, making them the cheapest option.  I ended up paying $39 for 100 envelopes!  I took a chance and just ordered the dark purple envelopes without ordering a sample since their samples weren't cheap.  We'll see how it turns out.

I can't wait for these to come in.  We really have to get working on invitations.  Our goal is to have them in the mail by the last week of July (so soon!).

Invitation Suite is Set

Way back in January (Wow!  That feels like forever ago) my fiance and I bought two Vistaprint.com Groupons.  Shortly after buying the Groupons we used one to buy our wedding invitations and inserts.  Now, since we finalized our menu for the reception, we went back and used our second Groupon to buy our RSVP cards and our Thank You cards.

I can't believe the deal we got.  We ordered 100ct. of everything in our stationary suite and paid only $85 for all of it including shipping (and including the cost of the Groupons).

The only downfall to using vistaprint for your stationary is that they don't have outer envelopes.  They include ordinary white envelopes which I think will work just fine for inner envelopes, so I just need to find outer envelopes to use with our invites.  I also think we will tie everything together with some cute purple ribbon or something along those lines.

Here's how everything turned out.  On the left is our invitation, in the center is the front and back of the RSVP card, and on the right is our invitation insert and the front of our Thank You folding cards.

The Honour of Your Presence

So as I mentioned here we decided to design our own invitations, etc. for the wedding.  As promised, here is what I came up with using Photoshop.  PLEASE leave your opinions.  I haven't ever designed anything before, so I'm worried that it doesn't look to great.

I am not completely done yet.  I still need to design an insert to mention our wedding website on.  I plan to band together the invite, rsvp card, the insert, and the rsvp envelope together with a dark purple belly band.

Also, as far as envelopes for the whole invitation do you think plain old white envelopes would work (free with the order) or matching envelopes ($90).  

The Invitations
Front

Back

The RSVP Cards

Front

Back

Vistaprint Dilemma

So I recently mentioned an awesome Vistaprint deal.  After reading the fine print, we realized that you had to use the deal by April 12.  That meant 3 months to use it.  Now we already sent out our Save the Dates, but we still have our invitations, programs, etc. to do  So, we went for it - my fiance and I each bought one.  That means we have $140 worth of credit to now use on Vistaprint!  Yay!

Now that hard part - figuring out what the heck to do with all of it.  After buying the Groupon and actually starting to look we found a few designs that were okay, but they just weren't what we wanted.
So we decided to create our own design (I will post about that separately)!  After adding it to our cart to get an idea of cost, we had a nice surprise.  In total, we are getting 90 invitations with white envelopes for only $48!!!

After seeing how awesome this price was, I decided to design a matching envelope as well.  However, I again went through the process of uploading it and adding it to our cart and received another surprise.       It was going to cost us $89 for 100 custom envelopes!!!  I am still wondering why this is so much more than the regular white envelopes.  Has anyone else had this issue?  Now I am trying to decide if I want to just get the white envelopes or go with the custom envelopes.  What do you think?


Sidenote:  if you are planning on using Vistprint for your wedding, you need to check out this bloggers post.  How I Used Vistaprint for Bascially Everything.  With my two $70 Groupons, I plan to do just that!

Wedding Music

I recently discovered a song that I am in love with.  I definitely want it to be played at the wedding.

Hard to Concentrate - Red Hot Chili Peppers

**Tip for Reception Music:  Add a line on your wedding invitations allowing guests to recommend a song they would like to hear.**

Online Surveys & Market Research