Whoop there it went!

Our first RSVP deadline has come and gone and I have to say I'm VERY disappointed in our guests. We sent out 22 invitations and have only received 13 of those back. That's 9 missing RSVPs. Everyone of those 13 were yeses. These 9 RSVPs equal 21 people of the 41 we invited. So it looks like next week we'll be calling and e-mailing people to figure out why we haven't received these. A little frustrating because we have to go through this process all over again with a new group of people. I do have to give a big high 5 to our friends because they have done a much better job than our families at returning RSVPs!

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!