Stationary Stationary

Everyone tells me invitations cost so much money and to be weary. I wanted to play it smart and make my own...

It all started out on dark and stormy night.. Well more like a beautiful afternoon but I found myself in Office Depot and bought 2 packs of print your own postcards. Well I took advantage and after two hours of fighting with the printer to finally print the first save the date. I also purchased post card stamps (much cheaper than regular stamps by the way!) and maybe spent a whole $40 on the save the dates! It was such a wonderful feeling to be saving hundreds of dollars! And the story always gets better...

For a few months I am searching different websites for a place to by recycled paper in bulk in a kraft paper color. If you haven't tried.. Good luck! Anyway I had already designed the invitations (hand drawn by Momma Shearon), scanned the image, and created the wording to be just perfect. With every intention of printing my own and putting ribbons and everything I ordered paper and envelopes. Of course as everything ordered online turns out to be (with the exception of the table clothes), the colors didn't match and the project became more difficult. Mom became frustrated and asked me why I didn't just order some invitations. I tried to explain how expensive (easily $800) invitations could be and that I had not budgeted that much. But she was determined. That weekend her and daddy went out to do some searching for invites.

That determination paid off. We found a cute store in Suwanee called La Ti Da that has easily 40 or 50 invitation and stationary binders. Scott and I spent a good couple of hours looking through them. We fell in love with one - really simple ivory with a gold/champagne ribbon and beautiful font. The down fall was the invitation alone without the envelope was over $1000! Ridiculous!! I could have made it myself! I asked the store lady to help find a cheaper version and we found a comparable one for half the price that we liked more AND all inclusive with envelopes and RSVP card. Much better! It was just over budget but we were able to cut back on a couple of other things as well. It was pretty fun though to customize it to even the font of each word, color font, color of the ribbon, and wording. One more hectic thing off the list! Only thing left is to address the envelopes... Let's see who's got nice handwriting....

And for those of you waiting to see it.. Check in the mail in the next few weeks!