Today is the first post of the details for our wedding day… starting with the stationary, of course!
I had so much fun with our stationary. I created each piece on Paint Shop Pro and got them printed through Vistaprint — this was such a cost-effective way of creating my perfect invitation.
To create these, I got a couple sets of watercolor flower clip art files made by DigitalCloud — I used this gold and mint watercolor flower set and this purple flower wreath. I played around with the clip art files to create my own embellishments to our stationary. For most of the elements, I just added some of the individual mint and gold flowers to chunks of the purple flower wreath to create something new. I could not recommend DigitalCloud for beautiful watercolor clip art enough!!
I also used a few watercolor backgrounds, which my sister, Jenny, shared with me, for the background of some of my text, as well as a free gold glitter background that I just found by googling (I will add a link to it once I get my laptop back from my parents — I left it and a whole lot of wedding stuff at their house because our car was so packed!). Jenny attempted to teach me how to properly create text backgrounds in Paint Shop Pro… I failed her way, but I did find out a longer way on my own. Less efficient, but it worked! 😉
For fonts, I used Sophia, a hand lettered brush script, for the fancier text, and TW Cen MT for all of the detail text for ease of reading. I love how they turned out!
All envelopes were also ordered from Vistaprint — they actually ended up being almost the most expensive part of the invitations! The thank you cards ended up being the most expensive. Every other piece, I created from the marketing materials postcards. Our card providing information about the shuttle we provided to and from the hotel, I put on business cards. We also, of course, made matching return address labels!
My sister, Lauren, addressed every envelope for me — aren’t they GORGEOUS?! Her patience is astounding.
Because I LOVE reading, I decided to go with a bookmark for our save the date. I really liked the idea of it being something people could actually keep and use in their everyday lives! I totally loved being able to use some cute puns, too… “consider yourself booked!” 😉
I printed these on the 4×6 inch marketing postcards, putting two on each sheet, so they were 2×6 inches. I used #9 sized envelopes for the save the dates.
I used the back side of both the save the dates and the invitations to share our wedding website so that guests could easily find the accommodations and further details about the day. SO much easier than adding little maps to each invitation like my parents had to do, haha!
The invitation was my main labor of love, as I overlapped watercolor flower file over file until it became just the burst of flowers that I wanted! I am so happy with how they turned out.
The invitation was printed as a 5×7 inch size. I actually ended up originally ordering the wrong size of envelope the first time around for the invitations; I assumed the 5×7 inch envelope would fit my invitations, not realizing the sizes end up slightly smaller than 5×7. Vistaprint was amazing, though, and sent me a whole new order of the 6×9 inch envelopes in the same design free of charge, even though it was MY error! Talk about good customer service!
The RSVP card was printed as the standard postcard size so I could include postcard stamps on them for people to mail them back! One thing I recommend as an absolute MUST for RSVP cards — NUMBER THEM by person or family so you know exactly who they are from. I had SO many people who didn’t write their name on them, which was extremely frustrating. We ended up playing detective and figuring most of them out based on where they were mailed from, but boy, make it easier on yourself and number them. Lesson learned! 🙂
Last but not least, our thank you cards! I kept them nice and simple so I could write as much as I want on the inside without any added text. They came with plain white envelopes, but I plan on using my left over 5×7 inch envelopes from my goof-up for the actual wedding thank you notes… which I have yet to send out. 😛 It’s on my to-do list!
Hope you enjoyed this post — stayed tuned, because next up I’ll have ALL the details about what we wore, etc!
For other wedding posts, here is the complete list:
Overview
Stationary
Getting Ready and What We Wore
Flowers + Decor
Food + Drinks
Ceremony + Music
Favors