Invite Only (part one)

Hi! Remember me? I’m that crazy, bi-polar bride who decided to take a week off from blogging just after she got her act together. Actually, writing that post in reference to Father of the Bride really helped me put things back into perspective—thankyouverymuch, Steve Martin.

So now I’m back and REALLY excited to tie the knot, and hopefully I can show you a few of the things I’ve been working on.

The week between Christmas and New Years was crunch time for us over here—I really wanted to get our invitations out before 2010. There really was no rhyme or reason as to why, I just wanted to get them out and on their way.

Our invitations were a labor of love, and for all you brides out there, I know you’ve heard that phrase before. Way back in the day, I decided I wanted our invitations to be one of the first things I crossed off my list. I didn’t want to work on them at the last minute, so I started my game plan early. I enlisted the help of my cousin to design them, but after life and several other (probably higher-paying) projects came into play, his services fell through.

Luckily, to my rescue came Bridget with Ella Elise Invitation Studio based in North Carolina. She replied to a post I had on one of my wedding boards about trying to find an affordable invitation designer, and the rest is…history.

Actually, I should say that early on, before I even knew Bridget would design our invites, I knew I wanted a pocketfold invitation style, so I price-shopped around (online and stores in town) ordered samples from several different companies and finally ordered the following:

Bronze Brown pocketfolds from Paper and More:

Cotton Candy mailing envelopes from Cards and Pockets:

And “cream” and “pink” paper from our local Xpedx (on SUPER sale, too!).

So we started our process with me showing her invitations I had found online that I like:

(This was the style I’m going for with the pocketfold)

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(I love the simplicity of this invite and that it matches our Wedding Web site)

No idea where I found this – whoops!
(I like the dots as the header)

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(Love, Love, LOVE, the simplicity, fonts, dots, and use of punctuation for the header)

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(Again, I liked the simplicity with the pop of color)

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(Do you see a trend here? Great use of colors, fonts, and simplicity)

So out of my inspiration invites, Bridget came up with….

Ah! You’ll have to come back tomorrow to check out the journey of our design. Let’s just say that she had some extreme patience.