And they're off...

The invites that is! Now that these babies have made their way into the world and our guests will be receiving them this week I'll share with you!

I found this invite from a wedding on a neighboring resort as our inspiration:

image courtesy of Style Me Pretty (photo by David Murray weddings)

And then found this photo of the Tensing Pen property:

image courtesy of flickr user lynagh

And then asked a very talented friend to make a sketch to create something similar to our inspiration photo.

I fell in LOVE with the result!

We decided to do postcards for the RSVP. We used Vistaprint because they are essentially free and we've had good results with them for various things in the past. We selected an engagement shot for one side and clever wording for the other.

Photo by Sam Nulton

Personal crappy photo

Next up we had to decide on our postage. Something Ben had no idea we needed to do. It ended being an easy choice. We really didn't have a choice for the postcard stamps but we don't really care that much (right 2).

personal crappy photo

Invitation work day

Ben and I (ok mostly Ben) finished designing our invites. I showed him options for wording, he picked one, then parents approved and he chose a font and put the words to our invite and I loved it and once again the parents approved of the design. We went to PaperSource in Brooklyn last weekend and picked up paper and envelopes as well as some markers to do some writing. We chose to go with the classic A7 size. Cream paper and peacock envelopes (links here & here).

Today we printed our invites. NO MESS UPS! The first print was perfect and our printer cooperated the entire time. 22 invites done! While Ben was printing the invites I was practicing writing on our RSVP cards. We ordered free (except for the fee for uploading our own photo) postcards from Vistaprint. We needed to add names and the RSVP date. After we ordered the postcards I realized we didn't include an RSVP date but this actually works out in our favor because of our A & B lists - they will have different dates. I wasn't happy with my handwriting (no surprise there!) so Ben thought maybe we could print on them. Turns out we couldn't. The ink kept smearing. So I just dove in on writing on them with a regular old Sharpie. Luckily, the smallest number of postcards you can order is 100 so we had plenty of extras for my screwups. Eventually, I ended up with a stack of completed postcards.

Next up was the envelopes. We were originally thinking of writing on the envelopes to personalize it but after practicing on a few we gave that up. So we tried to print on them. The printer wanted nothing to do with feeding that envelope through the printer. Plan C was then to go buy clear labels. We took a lunch break and walked to our neighborhood staples and picked up some Avery labels (link). I've typed all the addresses in and printed a test page. When Ben gets home from work, I'll have him proofread them and then we'll print the labels.

Tomorrow we'll head to the post office to get stamps for our RSVP postcards and invites and these babies will be on their way to our guests. That means Ben and I need to finish our website (we also ordered business cards with our website address on them) and pick our room at the resort REALLY soon!

Lately all of our decisions have been VERY easy. We've been running through these invites pretty easily. Hopefully everything else will go this well!

Deciding on a Guest List

We knew we wanted an intimate wedding but 35 was smaller than we thought we were going to have. This required us to cut down our list substantially from our initial list of people we wanted to share our day with. I initially listed about 50 people I could think of and after talking to Ben and our parents that ballooned to 60. Then Ben and I had the hard task of creating our A-list guests. My family is significantly larger than Ben's so we cut down from my family and some of our friends we haven't known as long to get 39 people to invite in our first round. As people RSVP, we will send out invites to replace the declines until we have 35 guests. We can only have 4 extra people that are allowed to stay outside of our resort as per our contract so we have to be very conservative when it comes to our invites.

We have gathered our addresses and are waiting to hear back from a friend who is designing our invitations. Unfortunately for you, you won't get to see the invitations until guests have received them!

Colors chosen

When we sat down to begin designing our website, we had to select our color scheme for our event - much to Ben's surprise. Lucky for Ben, I saved 3 color palettes for his choosing based on yellow and blues and different combinations of them that have caught my eye in the past several months. And the winner is...

(courtesy of the inspired bride)

Engagement Photos are up!

We finally were able to sit down together to pick our favorite photos from our engagement shoot. We narrowed down the 95 photos sent to us to 25! It was quite difficult but we did it! Check them out on facebook and let us know which ones you like best!!

The Perfect Venue (for us)

Tensing Pen

35 of our closest friends and family members will join us for an entire weekend on the property of Tensing Pen Resort in Negril, Jamaica. All of the cottages except for 2 will be our wedding guests. We are immensely happy with our choice and the staff has been nothing but helpful thus far.

I found the resort from a post on another blog. I can't wait to jump of the bridge like they all do!

Next items on to do list: finalize guest list, create wedding website, design & send invites, book photographer & videographer

We have a venue part I

We finally have a venue and wedding date set! YAY! 10 months after we got engaged and 10 months from when we will get married. Before I tell you about our venue I'll fill in the details about our venue hunt and the ones that weren't.

When we first got engaged it took us a while to decide where we wanted to get married. Our families live in 2 different states, we met in another, and live in a different one. The first places to be eliminated were where our families were. While the most convenient for everyone else, we didn't feel a strong connection to the midwest. We also quickly eliminated New York. NYC is VERY expensive to have a wedding in and our families would have to pay an arm and a leg to stay here.

At this point we were left with Florida, where we met. Neither one of us is fond of Miami so we knew we didn't want to get married there but our friend's family has a wonderful beach house on Captiva Island. I contacted them after a few months of being engaged. It was well over our estimated budget so it was quickly eliminated. I contacted resorts on the island after various google searches but wasn't that excited by any of them or their prices. Our search expanded to the keys and other barrier islands on the gulf but much of the same thing happened.

After a few months of fruitless searching in Florida, we expanded to more of the tropics, thank you again google and Caribbean Life and Style magazine (a genius Christmas present from my future mother in law -FMIL). Keeping track of all of these venues and their information was exhausting and difficult but a spreadsheet from google docs helped. After sifting through the dozen or so venues that sent me information back, I sat down with Ben to show him what we had. Together we decided on a couple of resorts to further contact for more information. This was based on price, location, amenities, etc. My coworker happened to travel to one of these resorts during this process as well. When she came back with glowing reviews we decided to contact this resort even more.

The venue that wasn't - Iberostar Rose Hall Beach. We were very excited to have found an all inclusive resort on the beach that has only one wedding a day. We were VERY close to booking with this resort after emailing for a couple of months when they stopped contacting me one or two emails shy of us sending in a contract. After 2 weeks of NO contact, a different person contacted me with the excuse that their email system was down. I asked her our follow up questions and waited a week for 1 of the 3 answers I needed. At the same time the group reservations desk wasn't getting back to me as well. Needless to say we feel we dodged a bullet on this one.

Up next moving on and finding a dream...