You are cordially invited...

First of all, I have to say that I have the BEST bridesmaid in the world. (you may remember her from my save the dates.) So before I moved to Amsterdam in January, I went to her house in Stamford, Connecticut and dropped off my HUGE box of wedding crap.

Since then she's been working like a busy busy bee to get my invitations out on time and they finally went out last week. Let's just take a moment to appreciate how amazing my bridesmaid truly is... this is what her coffee table drawer looked like for weeks:



If you remember, I was inspired to do boxed invitations. The first thing we did was finish the invitations. Then we had to order boxes. I looked at a number of places but finally settled on Uline because they were they only place that had the dimensions I wanted (9 x 7.5 x 3). Since we got kraft boxes instead of fancy colored boxes, they were only $0.60 a box.

Without further ado, here are my invitations:

Now piece by piece. We decided to go with three pieces. First, the map. I hand drew the map and L scanned it into her computer (did some magic fancy desiger things). We decided to print the maps on vellum and finished it off with a little twine.

We also included handmade luggage tags. I bought the linen and ironed on the "stamp." My sisters added the grommets, my mom sewed the corners into angles for me, I added the strings, Mr. P cute all the little plastic squares and L used her machine to sew the squares on. (If I have time, I'll put together a proper DIY post!)

For our RSVP cards, I ordered these great pre-cut cards from Envelopper Inc. Best thing about Enveloper is that they have free shipping for all orders over $50. So I also ordered the pink tissue paper and label paper from them! Since we are living in Amsterdam, we decided to do our RSVPs online. It was just too expensive to include postage to Amsterdam, and was seemed like a bad plan to have the RSVPs sent to anyone else.



We sealed the pink tissue paper with a little pink vintage label. I got the template from iDIY and added the words "Pura Vida" across the top. Our wedding date along the middle and our names along the bottom.


The last thing we did was order this great return label stamp. I designed the stamp myself and then L had it made up at a place across the street from her apartment. It cost around $10.


So that's it. Ta-da... Our wedding invitations! It was sooooo much more work than I could have ever anticipated but it was definitely worth it. One of the things about having a wedding planner is I feel like I don't get to DO that much. It's a lot of decision making via email or skype. Plus I've gotten a lot of great feedback which doesn't hurt! :D

How much "work" were your invitations? Was it worth it??