This is overdue…Our Invitations

I realize that this post is overdue and I still don't even feel like writing it but I can't really start talking about my RSVP trials if I haven't told you about the actual invitations, now can I?

Designing my invitations may have been the biggest headache and stress to date during my wedding planning. Mainly because I had a very hard time bringing my vision into reality and if I had unlimited funds I would have had someone else make me a custom suite. Alas the frugal part of me reigned my "But I want...." side in and I threw together these...

{excuse my terrible camera}

I wanted to carry the Kraft paper theme over from the save the dates but decided to add a more 'romantic' touch so I decided to add the doilies, which I took from this inspiration photo from a Style Me Pretty Real Wedding post

{source}

***On a side note, doilies from Michaels are the heavy duty ones for baking which have extra lining on them to prevent grease to seep through the paper…NOT what I wanted and had to return. The Bulk Barn's selection was the same as Michaels but when I went to Party Stuff I found packs of 25 for $1.00 so I was very happy, even if it took me a while to track them down. Would I do doilies again? Nope! I think they are pretty but they are extremely time consuming to glue onto the paper as the glue stick didn't run smoothly across the back of the doily nor could I put the glue onto the Kraft paper and put the doily on it as the paper is slightly raised around the tiny cut out portions. They looked okay when I was finally done 5 hours later but I saw a few at friends and family's house later and the doilies were pulling off the paper. Not thrilled but everyone said they thought they were nice so I suppose I should stop being such a Negative Nelly about it.***

As for the fonts, I downloaded the free font Scriptina, which you can find on sites like dafont.com, for our names on the invitation and the titles of the Directions & RSVP cards, and just used a stock font that comes with Microsoft Office for the rest of the text called Californian FB. As beautiful as Scriptina is I did have to do a little fiddling with the placement of the letters as some of them wanted to put too much of a space between each other making them look like I didn't know how to type, specifically e, t, & g. And the spacing between lines looked little I hit triple space, see…

Because I designed everything in Microsoft Word (I was too cheap to buy Adobe Illustrator, although I would love to have their Creative Suite….), the way I moved the letters closer together was to type the words in Text Boxes and put the more difficult letters into their own text box.

(For purposes of this explanation I left the outline of the text boxes on as screen capture doesn't show that they are separate without it but don't forget to select 'No Outline' under Shape Outline in the Drawing Tools tab when formatting)

I then moved the boxes to layer on top of each other until it looked more like they flowed together.

For editing purposes and ease of moving them around the page, I selected all of the boxes at the same time, holding down the Ctrl key and then hitting the mouse's right click button, selected Group, this allows you to move everything together without having to reorganize. (The right click menu doesn't want to stay up when I try to print screen so I can't show it…sorry)

As for the wording, I wanted it to reflect the casual feel of our wedding so I went with the following…
I also wanted to include a map but I put it off to long so I didn't have time to make one from scratch using one of the step – by – step instructional posts I've found on weddingbee, like this one from Mrs. Ballet Flat: http://www.weddingbee.com/2010/11/29/best-of-the-bee-making-your-own-map/ so I opted for using the map that the venue had posted on their blog and in Word just changed the color using the Picture Tools Color menu.

Rather than making another card to direct people to our website for more information on accommodations, travel and other stuff I just added it to the bottom of the map.

Lastly, the RSVP card…I didn't want to spend money on postage or wait for all of the responses to trickle in via mail so I opted to set up a RSVP page on our wedding website through mywedding.com but I still needed a card to direct them to the website. This is what I ended up printing…

(If I could do it again, I wouldn't put ___before each option as that confused a few people since they weren't actually meant to fill them out and I would have made the reply instructions larger as some people didn't know what to do at first glance…learn from my mistakes, right?)

When they went to the website to RSVP they would then get this page…

After filling out your contact information and whether you would be attending, they hit next. If they said they were attending they are brought to this page where they get to provide their guest's name(s) and each person meal preference.

Although online RSVP'ing works for most of our guest list, I did take into consideration the older generation, our grandmothers and a select few, who I printed mail back RSVPs for which I sent with a stamped self-addressed return envelope.

Once everything was printed and cut to size I bundled together the three cards with raffia and stuffed into envelopes I addressed by hand…no calligraphy though…just hand printed with a black sharpie.

And the end! See why I've been putting this off? Its ridiculously long and not that exciting. Stay tuned for my RSVP trials…

Dressing the Groom

So the one thing my Mr and I are not good at is "shopping around" for the best deal. This doesn't mean that we are frivolous with our money, rather we usually research on the Internet and/or talk to our friends and family before making a major purchase so that we weigh the pros and cons of different brands and also have an idea of what something is generally priced at.

But when it comes to the actual purchase, we tend to go with the sales person we like. An example would be the Plasma TV that we just purchased in March at Visions. It was the first place we went and we planned to price shop but we got a very knowledgeable sales person who didn't bullshit us and offered a really good deal. We weighed the option of wasting the rest of our day checking out competitors with the possibility of saving potentially $100 and we went with the TV at Visions.

How is this relevant to our wedding, you might ask? Well this is the same process that happened when we went shopping for my Mr's suit. We decided that since he had out grown his old suit that he had for at least 5 years we would invest in a new one rather then renting. We originally had a budget of $500 for an off the rack suit but when we went into Harry Rosen's they were having a sale for custom made suits. Normally we wouldn't even consider this as an option since it doubled our budget but we landed our selves an awesome salesperson who was really good at his job. He made us feel comfortable, explained that for my Mr's body type a custom suit would fit better and even had him try on off the rack for us to judge ourselves.

**Tip of the Day: If you are looking for a custom suit for your Mr, go to Harry Rosen in February. That is when they hold their annual sale.**

Now I know a frugal bride should say, "No Thank You" and continue our search for a suit within our price range but the practical bride in me still saw this as an opportunity to get something that would be of quality and last for a long time. We have at least one wedding or special function to attend every year so if he got a suit that he really liked and felt comfortable in I would hear less complaining when the time came for him to wear it every year. Not to mention that he loved the idea of having something made for him and getting to pick a pin stripe.

So because the sales person was great we went for a $1000 suit instead of a $500 one, as we originally planned.

Here are some pictures of his final fitting before we took it home, I think it turned out amazing and I'm really happy that we went with the vest as he has the option of taking off his jacket and still looking dressed up...

What do you think? Did you go over budget on anything and manage to rationalize it?

Funny that the groom is spending more money on his outfit then the bride did!

Putting my look together: The finished dress

It has been almost a month since I last posted about the wedding but now that I'm down to double digits for the wedding count down I've been a little preoccupied getting things done. Sorry but I'm going to try harder to keep you in the loop....it didn't help that my batteries died in my camera and I was too lazy to get new ones so that I could download pictures I took for posts!

So my first post after my little hiatus is to up date you on my dress situation. My FMIL has finished all of the alterations so on Sunday I had her and my FSIL lace it up tight and we made sure there wasn't any issue with the bodice portion. There wasn't but she is going to tack up the slip portion of the skirt since it keeps wanting to peak out the sides.

My Mr's cousin took me shopping for a fasinator and purchased a little bird cage veil one for me. As I'm planning on wearing my glasses I have chosen to move the fasinator farther back and have the veil portion frame my hair rather then my face.

What do you think?