Some amazing shots from one of our vendors

So it's Monday morning April 19th.  By now, I am probably almost through our first full day on the Gold Coast in Australia!  But I promised some scheduled posts while I am away to keep everyone busy.  And of course, if at all possible, I'll make some stops by the blog when we check in for internet access while on the other side of the world - unfortunately, I've got to keep up with the family and office while we're gone since it will be a full two weeks away!

Anyway, when I came across this amazing coordinator's blog (Joyful Weddings and Events) and saw pictures of an aqua and dark red wedding at our very own venue, I became obsessed!  And so I was so thrilled when they shared the names of their vendors.  That's how I found Stacia of Serendipity Design.

I contacted her and we worked through some ideas about my invitations as well as a lot of other stationery needs and the costs involved.  Stacia was willing to work around my budget and with some ideas like having me assemble the invites myself, I was able to get them for a very good price and even better quality.  When you consider that these were custom designed invites with photos on them as well as an extra insert card, well, the whole thing made me giddy!

I worked with Stacia via e-mail (she is in Chicago) for over six months!  We would go back and forth on revisions and ideas and eventually came up with the final product which the guests all loved! 

She has way better photos on her blog than I could ever have taken with my camera so I thought I'd share some with you:

Click here to see the blog posting on her site and be sure to check out her work...she is an amazing vendor to work with and has some high quality but still affordable work you should look into!

All wrapped up - a little tutorial

I don't usually do tutorials on my blog.  Let's face it, most ideas I have incorporated that are DIY were stolen from some other much more talented, creative fellow blogger bride than myself.  I am all about using other ideas, not coming up with my own.

But Em, over at Burning River Bride asked me to share a little tutorial on how I created these little envelope wraps for our invitations:

I have to admit, it's really not a tutorial.  It was very simple indeed.

1)  I got the idea from some different web site blogs a la these styles:

2)  I asked my sister to create a .pdf file of a simple wrap using the graphic from our invitations...I paid an extra charge to the company who designed them for the design file so I could create other stationery elements like the wraps by myself.  The graphic file looked like this in .jpg format:

You can use any type of program like Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Word, etc to create the basic wraps.  My sister created them in Illustrator and saved them as a .pdf file.

3)  I bought the pre cut stickers for the wraps from here.  They were very inexpensive.  They were the 7.5" by 2" labels...5 per sheet.  They provide you the dimensions you should use and even provide some templates for some of the programs listed above.

4)  My sis added in our name and return address on the back side of the wrap and that was it.  After we created the main design on the labels and printed them all up, I set them aside.  Then I created a Microsoft Word document of labels and used the Mail Merge feature and the guest list I created in Excel to add all the addresses into a blank word document.  (I printed the wraps separately blank with only our return address on them and then printed the addresses on them separately using the Word Doc - it's just a matter of measuring out and setting margins really).

That's about it.  I used the BlackJack font for the mailing addresses on the front.  I have to admit, I did need to play around with the margins and placement of the wraps a little bit on some test samples I printed on paper as all printers print differently and never match up perfectly to margins you set.  At least not in my experience. 

Here was our finished product:

It's really easy...maybe a little time consuming, but overall, pretty simple to design.  Have fun with it!

Lovelies from my lovelies

This is a three part post:

FIRST:  We got our first RSVP back from our invites last night and we just mailed them on Saturday!  And go figure, the first person to RSVP was one of Mr Fix It's kind of silly party type friends...he responded via our web site!  Yea!  So excited.

SECOND:  You know what's super cool?  Asking Mr Fix It to grab the box of 98 invites and drop them in the mail box at the post office knowing this is the first time he is seeing them in the envelopes and holding your breath with anticipation because you know he is going to flip out and make some negative comment about your super cute personalized photo stamps and the lovely envelope wraps you designed which you are in love with.  But...wait for it...my little lovely fiance shocked me when he looked at them and said "Is that our picture on the stamp?  Are you kidding me?"  To which I told him yes and gave him the answer about how much they cost (cuz I knew he couldn't get away without asking that question).  Then I said "But don't they look great, honey?"  And you know what he said?  "They look *REALLY* good...very nice."  Oh, how this man I love can surprise me sometimes!

THIRD:  In less than three weeks, my lovely baby sister (MOH) is throwing me my bridal shower.  I'm so excited about this big event to get all the ladies in my life together and celebrate our love and friendship.  (Have to admit that I'm a little sad a few of my super close friends won't be able to make it due to prior engagements - but such is life in this hectic day and age.)

Anyway, just thought I'd share the main shower invite she created with all of you.  It was not what I was expecting at all...but I guess my sister wanted to play off the fact that I love to cook and have lots of little gadgets and recipes and such for my kitchen. 

                                   

So in addition to this main invite, apparently there's also like some little inserts that may include something like asking the ladies to share their favorite recipe with me as well as something else regarding their words of advice.  :)

I've had a few friends say they think the invite is super cute and reminds them of me...so I guess she did a good job on the personalizing it aspect.  The whole affair has been a complete surprise and I have not been able to have any input at all which is totally fine with me.  I trust my little sis and I want to be surprised, too.

Anyway, this is the first party / get together where I'll have my entire bridal party together (except for my bestie who lives in Idaho).  I have been waiting for February to arrive for a while now...can't wait to share some pics and details with all of you at the end of the month.

So, did you have any special or favorite things from your bridal showers or is there something wedding related you are looking forward to as the big day nears?

You're not putting that girly crap on my invitations! (Seriously Saturdays)

Yes, that's pretty much the type of stuff I hear from my wonderful fiance, Mr Fix It.  I have to admit, I am jealous of all you DIY brides who know what a gocco machine is, have a Cricut at your every day disposal and embossed your STD envelopes.  I don't even know how you do it and am clueless about all that stuff.  So to even think my guy would help me with those type of craft projects is a serious stretch of my imagination.  Seriously...pigs would be flying.

The most I do when it comes to DIY projects is designing something on the computer, printing it out at work and sticking it onto or into something to jazz it up...see my Table Number idea here.

But what frustrates me the most is that Mr Fix It thinks half my ideas are too 'girly' for his friends and family.  When I originally showed him my idea for the response cards on our invitations the first words out of his mouth were "I hate it."  I later found out that the reason he hated it was not necessarily the idea behind it, but the flack he would get from his guy friends who thought it was silly, dorky, girly, whatever. 

You see, my guy is a construction guy...he owns his own flooring business and when he leaves for work in the morning it's in torn jeans, work boots, ripped stained t-shirts and with a disgusting dirty van full of tools.  When he comes home it's all the same but add in the concrete, paint, sticky stuff and icky dust he's been collecting all day and it makes this clean, organized neat freak girl go insane!  The first thing I want him to do is head straight for the shower!

He's a serious stereotypical tough guy...a surfer...a pet lovin' child playin' rough and tumble sports lovin' I'm-a-kick-your-a$$ if you mess with my gal kinda guy.  And so showing him wedding things like colors of aqua and cranberry and a swirly graphic design and silly photos on the RSVP cards with us jumping in the air and looking sad or pouty faced is just a big fat joke to him.  Too girly and too wedding obsessive.  He seriously can't take it.

I can't even imagine what our wedding would look like if I left it all up to him.  He definitely has his opinions and thoughts but the vision has mostly been mine.  So it's hard to know what we'd end up with if he was in charge!  I try my best to keep things personal and unique to both of us and to keep them not so girly but it rarely happens that he falls in love with something I have shown him...check my previous post to see why this is so exciting to me!

Anyway, I say all this because the invitations I showed you earlier this week, well he of course found several things wrong with them after the final version arrived....even after he had approved the colors, design, etc.  He thought the graphic design on them (the little swirly part) should have been in black.  Really?  Black?  I told his sister in law that and she looked at him with a weird face like "Whatchyou talkin' 'bout, Willis?'

So we stuck with everything as planned other than changing the simple font as I mentioned in my previous post.  But we did come to a compromise or I would not have been able to incorporate my response card idea.  We asked our designer to please print a certain number of the response cards without the photos on the one side.  So for that select number of guys that Mr Fix It instructs me to set aside as special when sending out the invites, I will be sending them the invite suite with response cards with no silly photos of us looking sad or excited.  Whatever...at least I still get my wish in the end!

They're here, they're here! The INVITATIONS!

I have been patiently anticipating the arrival of my mockup invitation...it was supposed to arrive by the end of the year (I've been working on the custom design with our stationery lady since JUNE!) but she got a rush order and had to put me off a bit longer.  So they finally came last week and I can share them with you! 

They are not in the same colors as our wedding scheme - our Save the Dates were but Mr Fix It wasn't as in love with the color scheme as I was so we compromised and decided the invitations did not need to be in the same color scheme.  However - the graphic elements you see on the invites *ARE* in fact being used throughout all of the stationery, favors, etc at our wedding...but we changed it from aqua (as seen in the invite) to turquoise to match the colors at the wedding.

Please excuse the quality of the images, I was so excited I took the pictures on my camera phone...it's actually not a bad camera but the lighting and such in my office is horrible.  So what do you think?

Look at how perfectly the graphic on the inserts flows from one to the next so that it looks like one continuous design!

I am going to add some clear rhinestone embellishments to each of the little graphics (one on each side) to give it a little punch and bling it up a bit :) 

The insert cards all lined up next to each other.

The insert cards stacked on top of one another to show the graphic flow :)

My favorite part!  The double sided RSVP cards...these are the 2 cards, one for the 'yes' responses (on top) and one for the 'no' responses (beneath).  The other side of each of these cards has the place for them to write in their info such as number of people attending, name, etc (see insert image above).

Close ups of the two insert cards with our pics showing excitement (jumping for joy) that they can attend and sadness (pouty face) that they won't be able to make it.  :)

Mr Fix It and my mother did not like the Century Gothic font I selected for the information part of the invitations - like the font for the 'Please reply on reverse' in the photo above.  They thought it was just a little too 'simple and plain'...so that is the only thing we are changing...going for something with just a little bit more 'pop' and something with serifs on the letters.

So after that change, I am eagerly awaiting their arrival soon.  To save some money, we had her shave a little bit off the cost of each invite in exchange for us putting them together by placing the insert cards in the pocketfolder and attaching the belly band ribbon and stuffing the envelopes.  Our personalized postage stamps have arrived!  They will go on the black envelope along with the wrap around address label that has the invitation design on it.  I will show you those as soon as we are finished assembling...my custom designer thinks she should have them shipped out to me by this weekend!  :)

Exciting news!

I won my very first giveaway on a blog! Woo-hoo! So excited, Carolina Bride just informed me that I won her poster giveaway...so now I have to go through all my fun e-pics and select the image I want to use for the 16x20 poster! Man I love the blogosphere! And Carolina obviously :)


Also, I found out that our invitation sample is in the mail and on it's way to me for final proofing! We finalized the revisions and selected the final photos and as soon as I get it in my pretty little hands I'll snap some shots to post of the real live invite!

What a glorious weekend this has been...I got to hang out with my future parents-in-law this weekend as they were down in So Cal from Redding visiting Mr Fix It and his brother's family. It's been so great to catch up with them and share a mini-pre-Christmas dinner :)

It's all in how you say it - the invitation wording

Let me first say, is it just me or is December a super hard month to keep up with the blogs and be able to comment accordingly?  I have been trying to 'catch up' on all my reads for the past three days...getting there! 

So anyway...we recently shot new pics for our response cards on our invites.  If you're wondering about this, you can catch up here.  Next to the creativity of the design on our invites, the wording is super duper imporant to me.  And honestly, I don't get all excited about boring, mundane, traditional wedding invite wording. Now don't get me wrong...I know the purpose of an invite is afterall to tell you the who, where and when. But what about the 'why'? Why are *you*, my ever so important friend/family member being asked to honor us with your presence on this special day. And why is it going to be so special? And what is your purpose there? Just to get sloshed and dance up the night? Well, maybe partly...but for me, as I said earlier, the guests are meant to be supporters and witnesses of a relationship moving into it's eternal stage. The people who have watched you, as a couple, go through the ups and downs of life together, stick it out, and still want to be together each morning - faults and all. These people, these guests, are the ones you will call when you get in a fight or when God forbid, one of you is ill...they will be the ones you rely on to help you raise your children and celebrate the milestones of a marriage. So they should be and feel important, loved, necessary to the process.

Thus, I browsed web sites, catalogs and invitations for the wording that would sum all this up...Not just "The honor of your presence is requested" but "will you be there for us?" I found a multitude of options...most too simple or traditional as I expected. But what I finally came up with...a beautiful blend of our thoughts and desires, is something I am very proud of. I feel it is personal and unique and most importantly, speaks to the relationships involved in and surrounding a wedding ceremony.

So what do you think?

Because you have shared in our lives

by your friendship and love

we invite you to share in our joy as we

Stacey Lee Ann Campbell
and

John David Beever

exchange marriage vows

on Friday, the sixteenth of April

Two thousand ten

Our joy will be made complete

if you will join us in asking

God's blessing upon this holy union

at five o'clock in the evening

Rancho Las Lomas

19191 Lawrence Canyon

Silverado, CA


And here's what it looks like on our invite:

REALLY personal invitations (actually, envelopes)

So I was telling a fellow Blogger Bride about how I have so much time at my job to play around with wedding ideas on the internet.  I'm lucky because I don't know how I would do all this if I didn't have so much free time at work.  I guess it would get done but not be nearly as creative or put together as I hope everything comes out on the day of.

Well, the newest little thing I found that I wanted to share with you fellow brides is how to create truly personal invitations...before your guests even open the envelope!

You may or may not know that the United States Postal Service offers a service to personalize your stamps with photos or images.  Well, I knew as soon as I heard this that I wanted to put one of our engagement pictures on the outside of our wedding invitation.  The guests may or may not notice it (they would be silly if they didn't) but it would start off my hopes of blowing them away with things they've never typically associated with weddings right off the bat...before they even get there.

You can play around with things like: * amount of postage you need on the stamp  * borders and colors of borders  * picture (use Photoshop or an editing program to colorize or spice up your photo)
Here is what I came up with playing around on the site today:  Photo Stamps

Our invitations are currently in process (can't wait to share the mockups with you when they are finalized).  But they are going to be aqua, black and white.  We will most likely go with a white linen envelope and then use an envelope wrap around label in an aqua damask type pattern to bring some color to the envelope.  Adding the touch of aqua to the stamp will be a cool way to bring it all together.

The best part...as I mentioned in my previous post, I did a google search for Photo Stamp Coupons and found a code for 10% off my order!  Woo-hoo!

What do you think?  See if you can come up with some of your own stamp ideas and share the samples!

Seriously Saturdays: Why I strongly dislike the post office

I don't like to use the word 'hate'...hence the funny subject title. I mean, seriously...it's kind of a mean word.  But I have to say, I am so sick and tired of the USPS! Not only have I had them deliver mail to the wrong address, lose mail, have mail show up over 3 weeks after sent and have to deal with their ever increasing prices - BUT on top of it all, they charge you a ridiculous rate to send a simple card...like a Save the Date let's say!

I should have known to check on their site www.usps.com and find out how much they would charge to mail my save the date cards. But I figured, "Hey, they're only a 6x6 square card and weigh the same as most letters do." So I didn't bother to check the weight and size and all of my STD's came back to me in the mail.

Ladies, never ever take a chance...even if you think you know what you are doing. Always test the weight and size of anything wedding related you are mailing before sending. Because now many of my guests received envelopes that have that ugly 'Returned for extra postage stamp' on them! UGH! It wasn't the weight but the fact that the cards were square that gives the post office the right to charge me for TWO stamps instead of one...so silly.  SQUARE?  Seriously?  I mean, come on...what does the difference between square and rectangle have to do with anything?

Have you had a run in with the Post Office or frustrations or problems with mailing or receiving your wedding related items?

Seriously Saturdays originated here.

I so needed this laugh today!

If you are not already a follower of Chocolate Lover's Confessions, you truly need to go check her out.  She encouraged me to start this blog and I love her great ideas and encouragement as I share thoughts and questions regarding all my wedding deets.  She even posts some great recipes to share sometimes.  But if that is not enough of a reason to check out her blog, then definitely go read her post today regarding this funny little gem!

Our Invitations: The first thing the guests will see

So after yesterdays rough day, I am excited to talk about something fun and wedding related! I have always said the invitations are HUGE when it comes to your wedding.  They are the first thing that your guests will see about your style and personality as a couple and what type of event your big marriage celebration will be.  I knew I always wanted something unexpected for our invites...something that shows that we will have a beautiful affair, but expect to be surprised and come ready to party!

Since the fiance is not in love with our wedding colors like I am, I decided to compromise a bit and we decided to go with colors outside of our scheme for the invitations.  We opted for an aqua (tiffany blue), black and white theme.  The actual color of our invitations will be a metallic pocketfold called Tiffany Blue like this:

So I found the inspiration for my wedding and it's colors from a wedding posted on the blog of Joyful Weddings & Event Coordinators.  While there, I also found the custom stationery company who did most of the work for that wedding and I contacted Stacia of Serendipity Design and asked her to help me out with our invitation and stationery needs.  She is pretty affordable considering you are getting custom work done.  I originally planned to make my invitations but decided it wasn't worth it based on the time, effort, printing, etc that would be required. This way, I still get to assist in 'making' my invites.

Here is what Stacia and I have come up with thus far...this is the most recent of our revised invitation:

Outside (will be wrapped with ribbon and bellyband closure):

Inside Pocketfold (inserts on right):

Close up of invitation and wording:

What I love is how the insert cards will be layered such that the graphic design on them flows from one card to the next as if it is one continuous design. I also love that this same graphic design will be incorporated throughout our wedding day on things like the menu cards, place cards, table cards, seating cards, favor tags, etc

Here are some of the inserts and wording (she left off the word 'for' at the end of Please join us):

This insert will direct our guests to our wedding web site (I am going to have her space our web site address a little further down on the card so it stands out a bit more):

Here's the very unique part...there will be 4 insert cards in the pocket on the right.  There will be TWO, count 'em 2, response cards...one for those who are accepting and another for those who have to decline. The back side of the Response card will have a place for them to list their family's name and number attending/declining. For the decline card, there will also be a couple blank lines for them to be able to write a brief message or well wishes if they can't attend. But the fun part? On the front of each response card will be a photo of my fiance and I. For those who can accept, this is the card they will return:

Notice that for our 'accepting' guests, we have placed a line on our invites that indicates how many people they can bring (We have reserved ____ seats in your honor).  This way, if we invite a family of 4 with children and we fill in '2' seats reserved then they will know that their children are unfortunately not invited...or vice versa if they are.  Of course, we will also be addressing the envelopes to confirm exactly who from each potential family is invited and whether or not a 'plus one' or guest will be allowed.  But this extra added little line on the response cards just politely helps ensure that they know how many we are expecting or allowing. 

And for those who have to decline, they will return this card:

I am not thrilled with how these 2 photos came out from our engagement session so I think we are going to reshoot them.  But I love the idea!  I think it's so fun and unique and have to give props to my teenager for coming up with it.

So what do you think?  Do you have ideas for your invitations or samples you want to share of something fun or creative or your traditional, classic sense of style?  How well do you think your invites tied into your wedding theme or decor...did you carry anything from the invites over to the other aspects of the actual ceremony or reception?