Cherish, Dream, Live

I've had my invitations since February, but they were designed back in December by my fabulous designer who I hired back in September. Yes, I'm a little crazy like that, but I wanted to start getting this detail worked out. Is it hard sometimes seeing a lot of fabulous invitations out there and knowing that mine have been printed for months? Sometimes - I've had my fair share of invitation envy, but I love what we'll be sending out to our guests in just a couple of months!

Source: Plush Paper

I had originally thought I'd DIY my invitations in order to save some money. I'm not very paper crafty, though, so I think that DIY idea was more of a pipe dream. One evening last summer, Mr. S and I were struggling with the look/feel of our wedding. I decided we needed to pick a font and once we had that font, everything else would fall into place. We both agreed on typewriter font, so I started searching on Google for invitations that incorporated this font. And I landed on these:

Source: Plush Paper

I loved how the typewriter font was used...and how fabulous is the picture?! I'd kill for this picture. I bookmarked Plush Paper's site so that I could reference this great invitation later on, but certainly knew I couldn't afford custom invitations.

A couple of month's later I decided on a whim to contact Plush Paper and just see what it would cost to have invitations designed and printed. Kathleen of Plush Paper gave me a quote that was only $60 over what I'd been budgeting for invitations - what I'd considered to be a pretty small budget overall...her quote covered a custom design, printing, 80 invitations, 80 reply cards, 80 inner envelopes and 80 outer envelopes and priority shipping to me (since she's in Detroit). Woo! I was so excited to know that I'd be able to do something that was unique to us, but wouldn't break the bank.

We chose to use a picture from our engagement shoot, shot by the fabulous Laurie Peacock. While it's not a soft and romantic picture - I mean, we're strutting across a parking lot! - we both kept on coming back to this shot when we were trying to decide on the perfect picture. I like that it's a strong picture and we're walking hand in hand. We incorporated a quote that seemed fitting:

Cherish yesterday
Dream tomorrow
Live today

Kathleen added some great damask details to the front and back to soften it up a bit (on the back our names are on that white stripe in a typewriter font).

Source: Plush Paper

I knew exactly what I wanted the inside to be - Madlibs! Once we had settled on using a typewriter font and wanted a vintage feel overall, Madlibs immediately came to mind. They use a similar font, were started in the 1950s and are very playful. This was a fun way for us to share the details of our day! And, breaking with tradition, we included the ceremony and reception information on the same card - easier for our guests to have the information all in one place, and less wasteful as well.

Source: Plush Paper

In keeping with the Madlibs theme, our guests get to play a little Madlibs too with their response cards.

Guests who are planning on attending get to fill in the sentence:

__________ [name(s)] will be there ready to __________ [verb] with you!

Guests who can't make it get to complete the following:

__________ [name(s)] won't be there on the big day. Don't forget to _________ [advice] after the _________ [advice].

I'm hoping we get some fun little pieces of advice in there and overall some silly responses. I think these could be a great keepsake after the day - maybe even scanning a couple of these and adding into our wedding album!

Source: Plush Paper

And finally, our envelopes. Kathleen did a fabulous job with the damask accents on these. It was an option for us to have the addresses printed on the envelopes, but that would have meant printing these much closer to the send date and me giving up control! I just couldn't do it. While I'm sure Kathleen would do everything perfectly, I wanted to control the final addressing of each one! I've got some plans for addressing these that I plan to share as we get closer.

Source: Plush Paper

What special touches do you think make your invitations unique?