Simple yet elegant
We ended up choosing invitations that were simple, but elegant. I lean a little more to the exotic, but my fiance leans more towards simple patterns. Thus, our invitations were born. It is a nice combination of simple and a little exotic. For those of you who received invitations, and find this hard to believe, you should see the runners up.
Once we chose the invitations, we had to order them. I have to say, this process is not for the weak. Ordering was pretty easy, go online, chose your card and all of the extras that come with it. Extra pages behind the invitation? Yes. Thank you notes? Yes, please. Address pre printed on the invitation envelopes? Yup. Hand calligraphy of names and addresses of guests or laser printed or none? Self stick envelopes or not? Menu cards? And the list goes on. You then need to send in the wording for the invitation, the RSVP and anything else you want in the invitation. This actually takes a little bit of work. Because the site was Indian, there weren’t as many examples of what typical American invitation wording was. My fiance and I searched the Internet for a while looking for proper wording and designing our cards. Then we had to figure out how to design an RSVP card that would allow us to let each guest list their dinner choice (we are having a sit down dinner). We needed to be able to provide the dinner choice of each guest to the event director by table, so it was important to get this information on the RSVP. Once we finally nailed it down, we sent the documents by email to India. Now here is the beauty of outsourcing… the next morning there was an email from the company with proofs for us. We changed a few words and the font and sent it back. The next morning the changes were made.
THINGS I LEARNED: Make sure you have multiple people proof your invitations, RSVP and guest list to try to catch all of the errors before you send them off to the printers for the final run. The company is not going to proof it for you, even for basic mistakes. Now, this could be one of the hazards using an outsourced invitation vendor to be sure. I don’t know what the American invitation companies are like.
The back and forth went on for a few more turns until we were done. We then ordered the invitations a month ahead of when they were supposed to be sent. They arrived a week later. I was thrilled, they were well ahead of when we needed them. Remember the smell I referred to in an earlier post? Well it was strong! We separated all of our invitations and envelopes and let them air out. I was very glad we had gotten them so far ahead of when we needed them. Little did I know, that I was going to need that time.
Invitations, Things I learned |