The honour of your presence...
We sent our our Save the Dates about 10 months prior to the ceremony. We ordered magnets from Vista Print, because the price was right and they had a great design that fit our fall look. We also printed our own postcard size inserts with hotel block information. Here's the proof, the final product looked at good!
Our invites were a Nu Image design, and our vendor was www.personallyforyou.net. The price was fantastic, and our service from Marjie, the owner, was amazing. She called to confirm all the details, dealt with an issue with the printer immediately, and the invtes were beautiful when they arrived. In addition to our invite package from her, we ordered the direction cards (linen finish postcards) from Vista Print. They came fast and were a good quality. After the invites were stuffed, we hand addressed the inner envelopes in gold paint pen, and printed the outers on our printer to match the pre-printed return address on the backs. Ceremony cards on the left, everything else on the right!
The rest of the paper
We wanted to include the music for the mass in our ceremony programs, so what is usually one of the last details people are thinking of was our biggest DIY undertaking. We made booklet style programs, cream copy paper with a colored paper cover that was stamped with a gold maple leaf. They were originally going to be tied with gold ribbon (which is what's in the pics), but the final product was tied with natural colored raffia, much easier to work with and looked just as nice. One thing we DIDN'T realize was that metallic ink takes more than 24 hours to drive, so for about a week, we had 200 programs strewn around our one bedroom apartment waiting for them to dry! Overall, though, we were really pleased with the final product!
We also made our own placecards. We were required by the venue to indicate the entree choice of each guest in some way on their card, so we decided to color code them by entree: yellow for turkey, red for prime rib, green for vegetarian. We got colored cards from the Paper Source and then printed cream colored oval shaped labels for each card. Below is the general idea, but the leaf motif and font were different in the final product.
Ceremony and Reception Accessories
We included a unity candle as a part of our mass, and we chose a candle with the espousal symbol on the side to signify the presence of God in our relationship and decision to marry. We used our baptismal candles as the tapers, and the stand is from Michael's.
In place of a traditional guest book, my sister bought us a signature platter for our reception. It's a really cool piece to display along with our cake topper and a Waterford candle set we got as a wedding gift in our apartment. It was such a good idea, and more "useful" that a guest book we'd never read. Here it is unsigned...
