The addressing has begun

I’m hand writing the address on all of my wedding invitations. No, I’m not a great calligrapher. You all have seen my attempts at mastering the elusive ampersands. I’m not even using a fancy fountain or calligraphy pen. Just a new Sharpie brand pen, fine point, which I’m very fond of and which writes a nice strong (but not marker-thick) and smooth line. Also, it’s PERMANENT, smear-resistant, water proof… qualities we all need in planning for a wedding and for a marriage, I think.

And sure, it would probably be pretty easy to Mail Merge our guest list Excel file into some neat labels. But nevertheless, I like the idea of putting my hand on every invitation. I hand wrote our save the dates on those New York postcards, and no one said a word against them. They were homemade-looking, and I liked it that way. It feels like I’m putting my personal signature on the things I send out, even if we are sending the very same set of invitation, response card, and insert to all of our invited guests. The invitation is coming from us, and not a machine.

Last night I did 45 envelopes, and on some of them I even spelled out Massachusetts and Pennsylvania (even though the Sweets said the Post Office doesn’t like that). I think I spelled them all correctly. I’ll be double-checking my work tonight!

And also, the future in-laws are coming over for dinner and to help us make sure I got all the Chinese names right. Maybe they’ll help us make an insert for our non-English-speaking guests’ invitations? Or use my Sharpie on our inserts to hand-write a note in Chinese?

Pictures and details will be posted soon.

More postage…

With the invitations coming on Monday, and our plan to get them OUT to our guest list as soon as possible, I realized I needed to order more stamps. Somehow I forgot about reply envelopes…

But — oh, no! — when I went to order more stamps, I found that the great ones I bought in July are NO MORE. What up, USPS? So, I’ve selected a second stamp:

festive enough...

I like it just fine, but it definitely doesn’t feel of a piece with my other stamps. So, the question for me is, split the invitations between this and that, or the art stamps on the invites and the Celebrate! stamps on the reply envelopes? Sweets and I are divided on the question (because of course he has an opinion!). Thoughts?

please celebrate with us!

The sweets and I ordered wedding invitations this past weekend! It’s so real now, right?  We ordered from Wedding Paper Divas (a friend who is getting married NEXT WEEKEND — Congrats, Yasmine! — raved about them) and I was really pleased by their reasonable prices and customizable designs. And the Sweets and I had very different points of view about what our invitations should look like, and this design made us both very happy — it’s our wedding!

The red berries on the branch are much like the winter berries ideas I had a few months ago, and so I think it will help us to get started with a florist. What do you think — the invite is beautiful next to these flowers, right?

And of course the branches also tie into the birds — the cardinals I previously called my “singing little details.” It’s all coming together! Just in time for three months from tomorrow!