Mike and Kerry's Invitations

I can't believe it's that time already! But last week Chris and I received the invitations to Mike and Kerry's wedding!! Note the hand-cancelled invitation, stamped evenly and perfectly over the stamp, good job Kerry! ;)

Kerry tied the invitations together with Baker's Twine she got at Paper Presentation in the city! 

Our particular invitation had a hand written reply envelope with delivery to "the basement" since they are living in the apartment downstairs right now. It was a cute and personal touch for us :)

I love the colors, I love the theme throughout the whole suite, which also ties into their Fall Wedding perfectly. In a few words: I cannot WAIT for this wedding!

One Last Invitation

All our invitations have been out for weeks now, but there was one more couple we still needed to invite:

Here's a closer look:

I feel bad that I printed his on a crappy label....I guess for the President, I could have done it nicer. But truthfully, we didn't really have envelopes to spare, so I had to use one of our mistake envelopes from our initial print job. I've also had this envelope in my purse for a few days and it got a little bent around the edges, whoops! Anyway, I found this blog post on Gwenniepie waaay back when I first got engaged about mailing an invitation to the White House and saved the post for when I actually mailed our my invitations!

I googled "mailing a wedding invitation to the White House" and found the proper way to address the invitation at YourWeddingplace.com:

How to invite United States President to your wedding:

The Honorable Barack Obama and Mrs. Obama
The White House
Greetings Office Rm. 39
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, DC 20500

The white house will send back an "official" regrets reply if you send them an invitation! Certainly something for the scrapbook and a little keepsake of the year you got married.

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So look out for your invitation President Obama...oh and also: We are registered at Bed, Bath and Beyond and William Sonoma! Just in case you decided to send us a gift!

Security and secret service fees weren't exactly worked into our budget....what do we do if he actually comes?! I'll worry about that when the time comes...

Will/Did you invite the President to your wedding?

Invitations

Now that all our invitations are out, I can finally share them with you. I explained my feelings on the invitations a while back: I wish I could say I did them myself...but this was one area I just didn't have the energy to tackle. Annette (I heard Your Getting Married) was recommended to me through a friend's sister and she came in and saved the day! We met with her and after looking through a ton of books, finally decided on this suite:

http://www.iheardyouregettingmarried.com

Perfect for our color scheme, simple, yet elegant...it was pretty much the only one that stuck out at me.

The order process took a little longer than I had hoped: place the order, get a proof, correct the proof, resend it, get another proof back, make another change, wait for the final proof. This all took several weeks and I finally was starting to get very panicky that these were never going to be printed! When they finally did come in, Annette worked tirelessly through her weekend to assemble and address all our invitations for us. She was super great about it (and also probably didn't want to hear me badgering her about them anymore!) I am so grateful that she took care of all this for us, and so happy it was a generally stress free project. Here are all the pieces we got back for our invitations:

 

All the inserts

I hope you all like them! It's so crazy to be getting responses back for our WEDDING already!!

STAMPS

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When it came to getting stamps for all of our invitations, we went to a post office one Saturday with our sample to see how much the envelope would cost to mail. I could immediately tell the woman behind the counter had no clue what she was doing. First of all, it took her about 5 minutes to answer us, she was pressing a ton of buttons on the screen, and at one point...looked up at the ceiling and starting counting off numbers as if she was adding up in her head. Then she pressed down on the scale with her hand, looked at us and said:

"ummmmm .81 cents"
I said...
-"really? you're sure it's .81 cents? For this one envelope?"
-"yes".
- "It says .81 cents right there on your screen? Can you show me that?"
-"ohhh...umm ok, hold on"

She then proceeds to go through the whole process again to get .81 cents on the screen for me to see. Chris looked at me and his eyes were saying "Do NOT buy .81 cents worth of stamps here, this woman is clearly an idiot." At that point...all the post offices were closed so we couldn't get a second opinion. But we drove over to Chris's office where they have a mailing machine. We put it on the scale and it said .61 cents. That made sooo much more sense to me. From everything I had been reading online and from what I've seen in other invitations that have been mailed to us, that's what I was expecting. What on earth was that woman doing? Did she think I had asked her for the total cost of the invitation + the weight of her hand??

Oy...So Chris's mom very generously took our invitation to a different post office that Monday to confirm that .61 cents was all we needed, and this different post office did in fact confirm this price.

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We got the pretty .61 cent cake stamp and got to work stamping our envelopes! The lesson? Make sure you don't get jipped by your local post office!

Another thing I learned: Nicole-Lynn at Seaside Smitten gave me the great advice to "hand cancel" the invitations when they are dropped off. This way, they are not electronically run through the machines which might damage them.

Again, because we got our invitations on a Monday night and were mailing them on a Tuesday, Chris's mom offered to take them to the post office for us. I wasn't about to commute into the city with over 100 invitations just so I could personally mail them. But, I did feel a little sad that I wasn't there for their release. I felt like it was my children's first day of kindergarten and I wasn't there to see them off. (Dramatic, I know). I asked her to have them "hand-cancel" the invitations...thinking they would take care of it when she dropped them off. Well...the clerk handed her a stamp and showed her a workstation where she could do them. Chris's mom proceeded to stand in the post office and individually stamp each invitation!!! I feel so bad she had to do that herself! She was definitely a trooper when it came to our stamps AND mailing our invites, and we can't thank her enough for helping us out with that!

Tomorrow, I'll show you our invites! And don't forget to vote in Wednesday's Wedding Poll: "Are You Changing Your Name?"

Paper Presentation

Yesterday on my lunch break I went to this amazing store near Union Square called Paper Presentation.

http://www.paperpresentation.com

They had everything you could possibly imagine when it came to paper, invitations, programs, guest books, ribbons, boxes, gifts, scrapbooking, I could go on but you get the point. I wasn't able to get nearly as many photos as I wanted, as my time was limited and I found my eyes glazing over every two seconds from visual overload.

Great Gift boxes

Look at all the different ribbons!

This is literally an entire shelf of just envelope liners:

Teeny tiny envelopes, so cute!

Decorative paper for invitations - There were probably 12 different shelves with different paper like this:

My time there was limited, and I only bought one thing. But, you can bet the wheels are turning for what I want to purchase for my next visit. I will say this store was a bit pricey. Most of the paper supplies are sold in packs of 25, so making things in bulk could add up. But, I'm actually very curious to do the math on how much my invitations would have cost if I did them myself buying each piece through this store versus going with the lady who did them for us. That will be a little price comparison lesson for another day when I have time, but curiosity definitely has gotten the better of me on that one. One thing is for sure, despite the price you most certainly couldn't beat the selection or the quality of their supplies. This store was a great little find!

Check out Paper Presentation's Website here! Did you find any fantastic specialty stores like this as you were planning your wedding?

Invitations

ACK! no post yesterday and no "real" post ready today! Sorry we've been busy with THESE:

 

Well...our wonderful invitation lady was busy with them all weekend. We picked them up rather late last night, came home, and got to work on sealing, stamping and triple checking them. Now it's after midnight and I need to go to bed!! Besides the few that need a quick address fix, these are ready to drop tomorrow!! So exciting!!! 

Chris hard at work sealing envelopes

In the meantime, check out my most recent Weddzilla post about Foodieregistry.com!

I'll be back with more updates tomorrow!

Invitations and wedding bands

I had such a great time last night talking with Kim and Heather on Blog Talk Radio. It was totally laid back, and we talked about some really great topics on weddings and blogging. Thanks so much to Heather for inviting me to join her and I hope we get to do it again! If you missed it, be sure to listen here: download

On to wedding updates: This past weekend we ordered our invitations and picked up our wedding bands! Unfortunately, I can't show you a picture of either. I want to wait until our invitations are mailed out and Chris asked me to please wait to show our rings until the wedding, which as much as I LOOOVEEEE them and can't WAIT to show them to you, I understand and will therefore wait to show you. (sorrrry)

But here's a really unique wedding band set! Very clever...rather odd...and quite suggestive I'd say??

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It was all I could do to not keep my wedding band on all night on Monday! It felt so weird to be wearing two rings..I felt like I just got used to the one..now I have to keep track of two?? Oy...this whole "getting married" stuff is complicated! The diamonds on my band match the small diamonds that are on the band of my engagement ring. They actually look like a set together, even though they weren't bought as a set. And for Chris' ring, it's exactly what I pictured for him when we set out to look at rings, I LOVE it. We found one that was "ok" at the jeweler, but the band was a little too narrow for his finger. So "our" jeweler, Teddy, made this one special for him with a wider band. It's a yellow gold band, with 2 thin strips of ribboned white gold on either side..it looks totally great on him! But it's weird...it's going to take some getting used to seeing him wear a ring!

Again, I can't show you our invitations, so here's a picture of the royal wedding invitations which went out this weekend!

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Mine do not look like this..but how cool is "The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by the Queen"??

We ordered through a very nice lady named Annette who has an invitation company out of her home called I Heard You're Getting Married. She was recommended to us by a friend's sister who got married a few years ago. She places the order for us, assembles everything, puts stamps on the return envelopes and addresses the outer envelopes for us.

Look, I'm all about D-I-Y and I like to be creative whenever possible. But, when it came to invitations...this was one place where I really, truly, didn't want to do this on my own. I went the easy route: I'm admitting it, and I'm fine with it. I also really like the invitation set that we picked: it matches our color scheme, and is very simple, yet elegant. We are cutting these down to the wire. These should have been out, well yesterday...but now they should be out by the first week of March and I will definitely breathe a huge sigh of relief when they finally drop. As on top of things I've trie to be...there was bound to be something that cut down to the wire, and that something happened to be the invitations.

That's all for now...check back tomorrow to vote for a friend who is in a very special wedding contest!