You're Invited.

Being organised as ever, our invitations arrived in the post today!

I get the majority of my post delivered to work (to avoid those little red slips that summon you to the Post Office when no one was in to receive the package) so I've already had them out of their box.  I'm really, really pleased with them! I can't wait to get home and show Michael - I know he'll be happy with them too. 

They took so much hard work and effort to get right. Picking an invitation is hard work as it is, with so many options to choose from.  I ended up designing mine almost from scratch, but with a basic template to help me.  The company who printed them is based in America and our invitations arrived with a "Made in New York City" stamp which we love.  I spent countless hours at my computer designing different variations and we had a few different samples sent out to us (each one taking a week or two at a time to arrive) but the design we ended up picking was our absolute favourite.

Tip: If designing and ordering your invitations online, it's worth checking out the American versions of the websites.  We originally designed ours on a UK site but happened to sign into the American site by mistake.  Out of interest, I checked the price in USD against the price in GBP and there was a dramatic difference once the exchange rate was applied.  I was also able to track down lots of discount codes and coupons that were exclusive to the American version and we ended up with discounts of 20% on our invitations and 50% on some additional matching stationery we ordered to compliment them. YAY.

We ordered 2 variations of the same design as our family invitations are slightly different because we're having a champagne reception/cocktail hour before the main reception starts.  It's just an opportunity for our families to meet and loosen up a bit before the party starts!  We can't wait to send them out to everyone.  I am ridiculously impatient when it comes to these things and I'm looking forward to seeing the RSVP's roll in.  It's exciting!  We'll likely send them out in late October,which seems like ages away to me right now.  I like the idea of hand delivering each invitation personally so I think we'll take an evening to wrap up warm and venture out to deliver them to everyone. We'll obviously have to post some of them, especially as we have so many guests flying over from England for the occasion.

Another thing ticked off the to-do list :)