We used Budget Savvy Bride’s idea and turned it into our own, much like we’ve done with everything else.  While I don’t always agree with her ideology, she is super creative.

Anyhow, here is our finished product:

I am super proud of them. See those birds? Those are hand-stamped, by moi! As are those vines, but that was a bit easier. They were also cut and glued by hand by myself and my maid of honor, as well as Chet. Chet did the labels, see that thing in the back?

Man, that was hard work. But I think they ended up being worth it.

We started out on Thursday night rolling the RSVP’s. See those vines? That actually took about an hour to do for the 80 or so we did.

Then, on Friday, we started stamping birds.

This is the Darth Vader trick. It’s patented, taught to me by Charlotte.  See, when you color the birds red, you have to wipe off the feet and the beak and color them yellow. By that point, the red ink has dried a bit, so you must blow on it. That’s right. Blow on it. The heat from the air re-wets the ink and thus, you get to stamp them. By doing that, you get these adorable invites…

Tell me those aren’t adorable! If you don’t like them, well, don’t talk to me.

Now, onto the envelope wrappers. I wish I could remember where I found them, but I can’t currently. Shoulda bookmarked it. Anyhow, we ended up doing these becuase my wonderful friend Charlotte, who had volunteered to do calligraphy had something come up and she couldn’t do it. Well, I can’t do calligraphy, and neither can Chet. So, we opted to use our great stamp as well as my handwriting. It was a pain in the butt, however, it turned out lovely.

Charlotte also paid for the paper as well as the bird and vine stamps plus ink. That obviously was a huge cost reduction for us. In total, we paid for the stamps to mail out (and purchased them when they were only .42!).  We also bought the sticky paper for the envelopes and I paid to have them printed in the design center by my office.

Let me pause here: stamps. Sara, over at 2000DollarWedding at one point in time said that she was upset because they couldn’t afford photo stamps for their invitations. When I read that, I thought to myself “Are you crazy? That’s what you’re worried about?!” I was definitely quick to judge. Then, I had to send out our invitations. I had these beautiful things, gorgeous, really, and I had to put those ugly forever stamps on them. While they weren’t panther stamps, I still was not please, at all. It was kind of like the brown lace. However, this time, I couldn’t change it. It’s still driving me crazy.

Moving on….

Personally, while I think it was cheaper to do them myself it was a pain in the butt. Honestly, if I had to do it over again, I would set aside more money for sending the invites out to be printed. It would just be better. I am not a crafty lady, so this was just too much for me. Yes, they are adorable. No, I would never, ever, ever, do it again.

But then again, should something happen to me and Chet… I wouldn’t plan another wedding. Nope. Sure wouldn’t. But that’s for another post.

Sources:
Envelope Mall for the RSVP envelopes and the mailing envelopes. We had originally intended on doing postcards, but the font was too small. Oh well.
Stampin’ Up! for the stamps and the paper.
For printing, cutting, and gluing, we used stuff around my parents house. My mom is a super crafty lady so she has lots of neat things.

Phew. That post is done.

Okay, see, I love that. I’m not sure why, but it’s a pretty brilliant quote.

Anyhow, invitations are done! And they are in the mail (thanks Chet!!), and on their marry [it's a pun, get it?] way to their new homes. Because, God Bless it, they are out of mine.

So, you may want to see photos of them, right? Well, I’m opting to not show them until I know that some people have gotten them already. This is mainly because I want you all to be shocked at how amazing they are!!!

But, I will leave you with these goodies:

This is from Thursday night; the RSVP cards are done, kind of, and I’m preparing myself for the real work.

This is from Friday night before I figured out how to streamline everything. Notice how hard Chet is working…

All done and ready to be mailed out.

Okay, so, in total these invitations took about 11 hours to do between stuffing, stamping, addressing, stamping, sticking and it could go on.  I like them. I think they turned out quite lovely, though I think if I were to ever do wedding invitations again I would spend the money to get someone else to do them. Or do a view master invitation.

So, when you get your invitation that I(we) worked hard on, please, do not do as Chuck Palahniuk suggests. I would not appreciate it… at least don’t take pictures.

“What I did was pour out about a gallon of Chanel Number Five and put a burning wedding invitation to it, and boom, I’m recycling”. — Chuck Palahniuk

Anyhow, I’ll show you the ones I’ve fallen in love with, and then know that I must back away… slowly..

I loooove these. They would be so absolutely perfect. But, they are about $1.25 a card, and that my friends, is just too much for me to spend on Thank You cards.

These are just adorable. We may go with these, maybe, if we can’t find anything else that we like. These are $75 for 100 … is that good or bad? I don’t know, but they’re cute!

I like the twisty vines on this one. And the basic drawing/ prettiness of it.

This I think would make a great thank you/christmas card. See, I’m terrible at the whole 2 week etiquette thing: I have graduation Thank You’s to still be sent.

I love this one too. It’s so simple and elegant.

This = adorable. Probably not (at all) appropriate for a wedding thank you, but I love it!!

Oh etsy, You often get me into trouble.

Seems early, right?

Well, we’re stamping them, and putting them together, and we’re busy people. So no, it’s not too early.

So, here it is!

It says:

On this day, I marry my best friend. From here on out we will always have someone to lean on, cry with, laugh with and share the rest of our lives with.

Together with their parents
Nicole Marie Lozano
and
Kyle Chet Gassett
Invite you to share in the joy when they exchange vows & begin their new life together

Saturday, the twenty-first of November
two thousand and nine
at four thirty in the afternoon

Austin Hall
Sam Houston State University
Huntsville, Texas

Food, Wine and Merry-making to follow!

Cute eh? And if you don’t think so, well, I don’t really care. There may be some changes happening to them, but I really like them.

The little birds are the stamps. Everything else will be printed.

We actually stole part of the idea from Budget Savvy Bride. We didn’t like the folded look. But, we weren’t sure what exactly we wanted. And then I saw her’s. And I died.

See, she does this super cute thing with the three layers. I like it a lot. And it’s not folded.

Next, we have our RSVP cards.

Quick story: We were originally going to just do when to RSVP by as well as directions on how to do it online. Again, much like Budget Savvy’s over there. However, after our experiment with the Save the Dates, we found that nobody really went to our website. It’s actually pretty sad, because Chet has done an incredible job with it. Beucase of this situation, we opted to do postcard mailbacks. I’m a little nervous about this, but, what can you do?

Now, we have two choices: Cake or Death.

___Cake*
___Death**
___Other _______________

*will gladly attend
**regretfully decline

Or…

Cheeky choices. What to do, what to do?

__ Gladly attend
__ Regretfully decline
__ Regretfully attend
__ Enthusiastically decline
__ Will decline to respond but ultimately attend
__ Think you are just trying to wrest a gift out of me
__ Other__________________________

The votes from our friends are Cake or Death. {Please refer to this video for clarification} I like cake or death, but I’m afraid no one is going to get it. Now, there are little asterisk to inform people what each option means, I just don’t think people will get it. Maybe we’ll just send the video with it. I hope somebody writes in “I’ll have the chicken, please”. I’m betting it will be Eddie.

However, with the cheeky choices, I think that it’s too much for people to handle. And it kind of makes it look crazy busy. Jury’s still out. However we must act fast as these need to be stamped too. See those leaves? And the cute birds again? Yup, all stamps.

So, our Save the Dates came in. Yay!

Well, they actually came in on the 19th (super fast shipping, btw; I am definitely using snapfish.com for our thank you cards!). They are great. The pictures are wonderful, the quality is fabulous, and like I said, super fast shipping. We also really got to customize them for us, since we were able to put whatever we wanted on the back.. and we could type in the return address, which meant less writing of the same thing and the bonus was that it was free. Annnnd — if we had wanted to, we could have typed all of our text onto the card, input addresses, pay their shipping and they would have mailed them from the warehouse! Sweet!

Moving on… after dinner Saturday night, Jessi came over and helped me to address cards. You can still see our centerpiece in the middle of the table, which plays an important role soon. So, we got them all addressed…

75 in total. Chet counted.

Towards the end, Jessi slept…

and played with Jersey.

I don’t blame her, I had dragged her out of bed early to go shopping; she had to do something to keep her occupied.

Okay! So, we go them all addressed, and Chet and I were going to write sweet messages on all of them on Sunday, so we could get them in the mail by Monday, thus achieving my goal of “Save the Dates out by the 23rd”.

However, on Sunday, this hellion:

(who looks so adorable when she sleeps, don’t let her fool you) stepped in. To make my life miserable.

Ok, so that’s a bit dramatic, but you see, we left the save the dates, pens, addresses, aka everything on the table along with our test-piece. And my cat likes dangly thing, and our test-piece, does, in fact, have dangly things on them. See, we don’t let her on the tables/chairs in the house, but apparently those dangly things are just to much to resist and she jumped up onto to the table while we were watching a movie.

And then we hear that crashing sound and your heart drops right into your stomach because you know when you look around that it’s not going to be good.

And it wasn’t.

Jersey successfully managed to knock over the flowers, and all their water, right on top of the Save the Dates.

Madness ensues.

We rushed over there to save the save the dates. Because, you see, the vase with the gorgeous daisy’s was full of water — water which was now all over my save the dates.

So, we preceded to spread them out all over the kitchen. Luckliy, for us and Jersey, we only lost 4. And we had extras, about 20 extras, so we were able to fix it.

One Lucky cat.

So, since we saved them, we got to go ahead and message all of them. 4 hours later, we were done, had terribly cramped hands and were hungry. But we survived.

And we mailed them out!! People should be getting them… and then taking out survey!!

Getting those Save the Dates done made us feel so unbelievably accomplished. And made the wedding so very, very real.