Crab Invitation Reveal: The Insides
In my last post, I revealed the outside of our invitations. Today I’ll be sharing what was inside. Ours was a semi-DIY invitation. While we didn’t get nearly as hands on as the now Mrs. Squid did with her invitations or as Miss Orca did with her Save the Dates, our invitations required a good bit of legwork and elbow grease.
After we decided to move away from the designer we used for the Save the Dates, Mr. Crab was in touch with one of his professional contacts who is a printer. He offered to print our invitations for us at a discount, if we could provide a “print-ready” design file. On our very first call with him I explained that “letterpress” and “engraving” were outside our budget, to which he replied that he wouldn’t charge us extra to letterpress our invitations. Say whaaaat?
Image credit: Mindless4Greys
Well, hive, at that point my mind was off to the races with the possibilities of what our invitations could be. I was struck by inspiration and mocked up a suite in Powerpoint and sent it along to our contact to get a quote for how much it would cost to print the invitations.
When Mr. Crab’s contact offered to print the invitations, I don’t think he envisioned a suite with so many elements. Their company normally does high-end business stationary and other commercial printing. They don’t normally print wedding invitation suites which generally consists of short runs (small quantities) of several elements. It turns out, it must have been too much, too overwhelming, because he came back with a quote of $5,000.00 to print 150 invitation suites.
Image credit: Stubborn Thoughts
Did you just hear a record scratch when you read that? I sure did.
Our wedding is OTT, but we’re still trying to keep it together and for us, $33.33 per invitation (without postage) was orders of magnitude more than we budgeted and completely cray.
Suffice it to say, I went into panic mode, because I wanted to see if it would be possible to preserve my vision while bringing the cost of the invitation WAY down. Vistaprint, Martha Stewart scoring board, Exacto Knife, and plenty of elbow grease from yours truly and sweet Momma Crab to the rescue!
We had a couple things printed through Vistaprint making use of their many sales and promo codes, we used a trusted printer in Philadelphia for the RSVP cards and the envelopes, we folded our own card stock to keep everything all together, I cut my own envelope liners, we cut slits in the back of the cardstock to hold the RSVP card and envelope in place, we glued all the pieces together (using templates to assure proper positioning), and we cut and assembled our belly bands from scratch.
When it was all said and done, we ended up with a gorgeous invitation suite that maintained much of the spirit of the original vision for much, much less money (though double what we originally intended to spend). So, without further adieu, I present to you, the Crab invitation experience!
When guests opened the Cool Grey A9 envelopes they saw Onyx metallic envelope liners (the same color as the Save the Date envelope) and the invitation peeking out. The belly band was onyx metallic paper with cool grey ribbon and the art deco shells that are one of our wedding motifs backed with onyx paper (lovingly hand cut from envelope liner scraps by yours truly).
When the belly band was removed the front of the cool grey folded cardstock featured our wedding logo (on Vistaprint business cards with metallic finish ampersands).
When guests opened the card they saw our beautifully letter-pressed and foil-stamped invitation card printed on Crane’s Lettra Flourescent White #110 paper. Recognize the Bombshell Pro font?
A close up of the foil-stamped metallic name detail. Swoonzies!
Continuing on to the back of the invitation, the RSVP card features a close up of the Dream Garden mosaic (taken for us by Cousin A). The “Soft Coral” metallic envelopes were printed with Momma Crab and Crab Daddy’s address and stamped with Hudson River School stamps and lined with silver metallic chevron wrapping paper.
Front and back of the invitation with the belly band removed.
When guests removed the RSVP card and envelope they found another card that featured all the supplementary info including a note about attire and the website URL.
One of the things I thought really hard about was how to put all the pieces together so that there was a flow to the invitation. What would people see first? What would it look like once the RSVP card and envelope were gone? etc. In the end, we ended up with something pretty fantastic. The whole kit-and-kaboodle together looks like this:
Miss Crab
Birthday: July 10 Occupation: Post-Doctoral Fellow, Criminal Justice Research Venue: Atrium at the Curtis Center
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