Chapter Nine* The Invitations

I last told you about our “Almost Fight“. I was happy to put those big discussions behind us and start working on something a little more fun–our invitations!!

I was a little apprehensive about this task for two reasons: first, invitations can be REALLY expensive. Second, my family is HUGE. The “Guest List” was not a task I wanted to undertake! haha! After shopping around a little online we decided to do them ourselves to cust costs. I ended being REALLY glad that we did this as we had complete control over style, text, font, detail, spelling, and best of all–PRICE. I’ll tell you how much they cost a little later.

So, I started shopping. This wasn’t exactly the Hubster’s department so I took mom along. We went to all the artsy-type shops but I wasn’t thrilled with anything I saw. I am not one for anything frilly, I like things to be simple and elegant. I was really surprised when I found invitations I loved at the place I least expected to: Staples! There were actually two styles I liked, so I called the Hubster and got him to go out and look at them. I knew we were meant to be when he picked out the same ones I had loved… I mean, if that’s not love, what is? haha

The next task was to decide how many we needed, which meant drafting a guest list. This was quite possibly my LEAST favourite activity of my wedding planning. Seriously. I wish someone could have just handed me a list and said, “Ok. Here are all the people that are coming.” It was SO stressful–you always feel like you are leaving people out, or have people pressuring you to invite people because it’s just the right thing to do, etc etc etc.

We spent an entire weekend hammering out the first draft of the list. We knew we could have no more than 185 people as that was the fire code of the building we were using for our reception. I was immediately limited because my immediate family is HUGE. If the Hubs and I split the list evenly (ex: we each get to invite 92.5 people) my family took up about 70 spots on my list. Then there are your family friends, parent’s friends, people from work, from church, from the community, which leaves, oh, 2 spaces for your other friends. *sigh* Luckily the Hubster’s family isn’t nearly as massive as mine, so we were able to balance it out a bit… but in the end I still wasn’t able to invite half the people I wanted to which was really really hard for me.

But, that’s getting ahead a bit. Once we had our “final” number I started shopping. When I looked at having our invitations made the prices I looked at were at least $500 at a minimum price. We bought our invitations, printed them, included photos AND mailed them for less than $250.

We decided that our “mail date” was going to be June 15th in order to allow plenty of time for people to respond and book it off work. It took us a few days of hard work, but I was so so happy with our finished product. We wrote the invite ourselves, and it said:

I’ll post a picture next time.

Shop Girl*