allieplask's planning thread... lots of info/pics

Kristin Ri · June 3, 2012

Love the STD! Thanks for sharing

jessd123 · June 5, 2012

I would love for you to e mail me the illustrator file!! [email protected]. Thanks!!

brgephar · June 5, 2012

Great STD's and thank you cards! Thanks for sharing. Your location for your engagement party was also beyond amazing! Best of luck with the rest of planning!

Arch713 · June 10, 2012

Fabulous Save The Dates and Loved how your varied the Thank You Cards with 5 different poses. I know a lot of people talk in my family so having a variety is a plus!

I'm hoping that you will be posting your invites? I'm really curious on what you are planning since everything looks so wonderful so far!

Thanks for Sharing!

Lizrmt · June 30, 2012

Everything looks fantastic so far. Can't wait to see what else you come up with.

FabiLara · July 2, 2012

Your designs are great! Congratulations on everything.

Butterflies · August 22, 2012

I really liked the Disney card, so sweet! For my MOH I'm ordering a charms bracelet, and since she is a big fan of Hello Kitty, I'm adding a small Hello Kitty face charm, maybe it would be nice to go with a Hello Kitty card... but that would be too much since she is over 30! LOL

allieplask · October 11, 2012

A lot of planning happening lately. We have designed our WHOLE suite - invitations, STD's, luggage tags, welcome letters, thank you cards, door hangers, etc. etc. It was very important to us that everything looked cohesive! As we print/send out items, I will post pictures.

Our invitations went out last week and we are SO excited about the way they came out. We designed them and had the actual invitations printed by uprinting.com. I will post pictures of the actual invitations and the details a little bit later.

Until then... I have pictures of the DIY envelopes we put together. Our wedding colors are coral, navy, teal, yellow and bright green (shown below).

While our invitations use our exact colors, it was a little bit harder finding envelopes, etc. that matched the colors. Ultimately, we went Papersource (the most amazing store if you've never been) and got creative. They have so many awesome DIY projects, especially for weddings. You can even pay them to do invitations, envelopes, etc. for you! There we found that the colors "strawberry" and "midnight" were closest to our wedding colors.

For our envelopes we used strawberry envelopes and lined them with midnight wrapping paper (the wrapping paper was a much cheaper/easier idea than buying cardstock). We had though about doing the opposite (midnight envelopes and strawberry lining) but felt that the strawberry would help the invitations pop in the mail and give off that "island feel." The envelopes are size A6.

Inviting about 200 guests and mailing out over 100 invitations, lining the envelopes took a whole afternoon of working/watching college football. Papersource sells liner templates so we just had to trace the liner onto the wrapping paper and then cut out each liner. We got double-sided tape runners to attach them to the envelopes. Here are the envelopes all lined and stuffed!

For the return address on the back of the envelopes, we ordered a custom stamp from rubberstampchamp.com. We have a wedding logo that we are incorporating into different things and thought it was perfect to use for the return addresses. The major problem is that while a lot of stores, websites offer "custom" stamps, they are not really CUSTOM! They are only custom in that you can add your own names/addresses. We had our own design and wanted that to be created into a stamp. After a few google searches, we found rubberstampchamp.com. They were super easy to work with and the stamp is beautiful! The size is a 2.5" circle. We hand stamped the back of each enveloped using midnight colored ink from Papersource.

allieplask · October 11, 2012

Here is a closeup of the custom stamp we ordered and used... (I blocked out the address)

allieplask · October 11, 2012

We designed our invitations 100% ourselves. I have seen tons of boarding passes, passports, invitations in little folders (all are great ideas!) and was looking for something different. Since we are having a destination wedding, we figured we could do something a little less formal and have a little more fun with it. We chose a "z-fold." This means it's a tri-fold in heavy cardstock and it opens like the letter "z." When opening the invitation, you see the front back and the rest folds out accordion style behind it.

Invitations were important for us - we already send STD's and a few emails about booking travel - but we wanted our older family members who are not email/tech-savvy to have an actual invitation with all the travel information. With that said, we also wanted to highlight some things that hadn't previously been mentioned (ex. events we were planning, other things to do and when to RSVP) so people who had gotten the emails would also get something out of receiving an invitation.

The front page of the invitation basically re-told people what they already knew - the resort name, the wedding date, etc.

Here is the whole thing:

As designers, we knew we couldn't leave the back of the invitation plain white.. but we also didn't have any extra information for our guests. We found some information on the Visit Jamaica website about how Jamaican's speak and decided to use that. If someone takes the time to read the back, it makes sense and gives them some information about Jamaica, the people, etc. It also added a nice pop of color being the same teal color used on the front.

Finally, we didn't want to hand write the front of the envelopes. We figured labels were SO much easier especially because we also plan to mail out luggage tags, packing lists, etc. We figured using the labels would also use to just continue to have them re-printed every time we needed them (we used uprinting.com for the invitations and a local printer for the labels). We took the inside design from the invitations and continued that on the label so everything is cohesive.

Here is my FIL's invitation (it's a little wrinkly and creased from being passed around at his office hahah). Also, when mailing out invitations, make sure you ask the post office to hand stamp each one! It looks SO MUCH nicer.