Wedding Thoughts: Invitations

Yesterday I, with the greatly appreciated help of my little sister, Hannah, my sister-in-law, Nicole, and my mom, tackled another big hump in the wedding planning process: invitations.

Actually, I guess I should start with Friday. Hannah, my mom and I spent most of the afternoon and early evening driving around town, first to find invitations, then to look at shoes. From the get-go, I didn't think it would be necessary to pay for professionally made invites. Back in January, Jordan and I went to a wedding expo here in Albuquerque, and there was only one stationary place that had a booth set up. They had some beautiful stuff, and I got some cool ideas, but I had never planned on making a purchase.

Nicole has been infinitely helpful with planning everything so far. It was on her advice that we made our first stop Target, to look at their ready-made, pre-packaged and put together wedding invitations, complete with envelopes, RSVP cards and their corresponding envelopes. We spent about twenty minutes in Target, considering our options. Hannah and I sat on the floor in the card aisle, opening up boxes that weren't sealed shut to get a better look at the invitations. There were embossed ones, there were ones with velvet borders, there were several with ribbons, and a couple with pretty, printed designs. I like more than one set, but the price was again too high. A box of fifty cost about fifty bucks, and the fancier ones came in sets of twenty-five for almost the same price. I didn't want to spend $200 of our budget on invitations. So we headed out.

Next stop: Hobby Lobby. Now, I used to work at Hobby Lobby, and it wasn't exactly a warm and fuzzy experience, so I didn't really want to go to the Hobby Lobby I used to work at for fear of being recognized by any of the employees (particularly Whitney or Caitlin, I don't think they liked me very much . . .) Thankfully, there was another Hobby Lobby location just down the street from Target.

Pause. I realize that Hobby Lobby is not a nationally-known store; let me explain. Imagine a Super Wal-Mart, only it's full of scrapbooking supplies and balls of yarn and unpainted wood and (sometimes nice, sometimes tacky) home decor and wedding supplies. Also, it smells predominantly of fake flowers (which thrive in abundance at Hobby Lobby). If you're making a styrofoam model of the solar system, or if you're hand-painting a jewelry box for your mom's birthday, or if you're shopping for cheap wedding invitations, Hobby Lobby is the place to go.

It was also on Nicole's advice that we stopped at Hobby Lobby. My brother, Jon (Nicole's husband) put together homemade Christmas cards with cheap supplies bought in bulk at Hobby Lobby.

At first, things didn't seem promising. I asked an employee where they had sets of blank cards and envelopes, and he led us to a set of shelves on the end of an aisle (not even in an aisle), which had a meager two shelves with blank greeting cards and envelopes in plastic wrapping. Not what I had in mind. The invites at Target were still fresh in my mind, and I wanted something like a single card on which to print, not folded greeting cards. So we made our way to the wedding aisle to look at their ready-made sets of invites and RSVPs.

After some deliberation, I chose a set of pure white cardstock invitations. The invites themselves are about 6"x6", with an embossed flower-y border along two edges. The RSVPs are the same, only smaller. Hannah and Mom also helped me pick out some rubber stamps and colored ink, just something to make them more colorful and unique. All in all, I'm very pleased with the end result. And to think, when we embarked on our shopping trip I had little to no specific ideas in mind, and in a couple of hours we had everything we needed, all for just over a hundred bucks.

Which brings us to yesterday. Jon and Nicole came over around 1:00, and we printed, stamped, addressed and stuffed invitations for about three hours. I ordered pizza, we listened to music, and we put on the episodes of The Office and 30 Rock that I had missed the previous Thursday.

I think, although I haven't counted, that we got close to 150 invitations and RSVPs made up. We could only address so many, because my list of friends from Biola is still incomplete; although my mom wonderfully and diligently put together a list of her family and friends to send invitations to, so that helped.

Poor Jon seemed a little bored. He spent most of the time in the dining room, working on his computer, which the rest of us printed, stamped and addressed away in the kitchen. I hope he was able to get some work done. He got more involved later, though, when I tried to test out the sealing wax I had bought with the idea of adding an extra personal touch to the invitations. It was a cool idea, but it took about ten tries for us to get the wax to the right consistency, and then to get the seal to stamp in properly. All the while, my mom voiced her worry that if we tried to seal the invitations this way, we'd ruin them, and she also reminisced about using sealing wax when she was younger and thought she remembered that the metallic wax took longer to dry properly.

Turns out, she was right. And it says so right there in the instructions that came with my sealing wax set: metallic wax needs more time to dry.

So, we might scratch that idea, although I'd like to use the seals on something. Maybe programs? It just looks so cool.

Some photos: