The wedding invitations are officially in the mail to 601 (yes, you read that correctly) of our nearest and dearest!
I've basically been working on the guest list since the week we got engaged. We decided early on to be inclusive rather than exclusive, which saved some heartache and what would have been many heated debates on the sensitive subject as to who to include or not include in the big day. Hopefully this will not but a ginormous hole in our pockets when it comes to paying for this party (we're hoping that we have overestimated the actual number of attendees in all of our budgeting).
When it came to the design of the invitation (which I'm not posting just yet), I scoured the internet for inspiration and looked at hundreds of fonts. My cousins own a printing company in Lufkin and they very generously gifted their services as a wedding gift, which meant that I not only got to design the invitation from scratch but it was also free! The invitation is very simple, and classic, and I LOVE it.
With 300 invitations, the cost of paying for a professional calligrapher to address the invitations would have been ridiculous. Originally, my brother Brad was going to do the calligraphy (let's just say he's had lots of free time in the past to cultivate his art skills), but decided that his style was just a little.... well, not my style, so I decided to do it myself. I'm estimating that it took close to 30 hours to complete this task. When I first started it seriously took 5 minutes per invitation, but then I got the hang of it and was probably busting invitations out in less than 2 minutes per envelope. I decided to showcase our parents' invites on the tops of the stacks, but they sadly aren't my best work... it took me until about the Gs to really get the hang of the style I was going for.
I enjoyed every single second of the invitation experience and I'm excited for our family and friends to receive them in the mail! Now comes the fun of receiving the response cards!
