Holy Invitations, Batman!

Pretty early on in the wedding planning process, one of my bridesmaids JennCable (yes, one word) told me about Etsy.  If you are not familiar with Etsy - "Etsy is your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies."  Oh my - what a wonderful suggestion!  The Save the Dates, rehearsal dinner invitation, wedding program, and flower girl "basket" have all come from sellers on Etsy!  I have worked with a number of fun and incredibly talented people through this site.  My favorite part of this process has been having the opportunity to personalize aspects of our wedding through other people's creativity.

My first Etsy purchase was our Save the Dates:

Danny and I were both beyond happy with how these turned out.  It is amazing what a simple search of "baseball save the dates" can yield.  The cards were very well received, and so we were hoping to follow it up with an invitation that we liked just as much.  As it turned out, this was much easier said than done.  My first search was an online vendor that quickly became a headache because you had to send away for samples.  While I appreciated the fact that we could hold samples in our hands before ordering, it became a cumbersome process.  Plus, we weren't finding anything we loved as much as those Save the Dates.  So I went back to my friend Google to find local wedding invitation vendors.  Sadly, there are not very many places left that allow you to come to their store and rifle through invitations.  I found one that seemed promising and then spoke to a woman on the phone who said they had done a wedding before at Coors Field.  She was quite confident she could help us.  So one Saturday afternoon, Danny and I went:  DISASTER!!  I hope that I am not a drama queen, but I will say it again - DISASTER!!  As it turns out the sports venue wedding was Invesco Field, where the Broncos play and since our colors are not orange and blue they didn't know what to do with us.  Also, the extent of their help/advice was here, let me get you another book.  Also, for the most part "what you see is what you get" with wedding invitations.  Your only options really are, take it or pay an astronomical fee to make some tiny changes.  We left totally demoralized, thinking we were going to have to settle on something.  Danny and I have worked hard to not settle on anything in this planning process, and we did not want to start now.  Back to Google - this time looking for custom wedding invitation designers.  I found Sugar Ink Design in Littleton.  After feeling good about the email exchanges, Danny and I went to meet with them in person.  We walked out of that appointment on Cloud Nine because someone understood what we wanted, and was going to make it affordable.  Of course the process was not without a few glitches - most notably in an effort to make flower stems look like the seams of a baseball there were centipede-like creations on our wedding invitation!  For those of you who don't know, I have a terrible fear of centipedes; so this was especially horrible for me to see.  The ladies kept at it though, and we ended up with a final product that made us were very, very excited.  I am proud to say that a lot of work went into them, and that a number of people contributed to the final product.  I am especially grateful to my family for helping to wordsmith the verbiage since we could not go with something traditional, and in general being another set of eyes on the final product.  At one point Steph even volunteered to speak on behalf of other people to make me feel better - her quote was priceless, "they're kind of weird looking, but it's a good weird."  I preferred my bridesmaid Beth's interpretation, "it incorporates the baseball theme while still keeping it elegant." 

Honestly the invitations have been the hardest part of the wedding planning process to date, but it feels good to have them done and sent out.  It was also helpful to know that other brides can say the same thing - there must be something about wedding invitations.  Now if we can just get response cards that people are coming - so far we have more regrets than confirmations.  We do have a yes from two members of our bridal party, one of our ministers, and a verbal confirmation from Pam (yea, Pam)!  Of course, the invitations only went out last week, I am just a worrier.  Danny keeps reminding me, "if you build it, they will come."   I need him to watch Field of Dreams again because he missed a key component of that movie, the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson.  The real irony there is that the real quote is, "if you build it, he will come." 

I will stop now because otherwise this will become a post about that sordid Chicago White Sox team of 1918, aka the Chicago Black Sox.  I am pretty sure no one wants that - so I really will stop here.