Making a LARGE dent in the Checklist

Today, Saturday the 15th of August, I am finally DONE with our invitations!


I can't believe the relief I feel at this moment, my little babies are out in the world!
It's been a LONG process. I designed our invitations on Adobe Illustrator, printed them using both Kinkos and our home printer, and finally constructed them! The HOURS seemed endless only a few weeks ago. If I were to estimate, I would say I put in a good 60-70 hours on them!

I began designing the invites in May, having a final design chosen in June with a little help from Mom, Nolan and a few bridesmaids. I was excited to have a chosen design to play off of. Kinkos was dead on 7/4 for some reason and I was able to get a LOT of work done that weekend with everyone out of town. Kinkos also cut the invites down, so that was wonderful and cut my hours considerably. They only charge $1.50 per cut, so I highly recomend having them do it! If only they rounded corners too! I rounded 800 corners between the invites and RSVP cards! When Kerrie visited we accomplished a little bit more and finally had a completely constructed invite by the time Nolan went to his bachelor weekend, 7/18. Nolan was a huge help creating the invitations, he helped with stamping and cutting! :)

I constructed them with a few deadlines in mind. I had to get some done in order for Nolan to take to his bachelor party and a few more to hand out at my shower and bachelorette party; a total of 37 invitations that we didn't have to mail! A savings of over $22, completely worth the late nights scrambling to get them done. I really had the best intentions to complete them the week I returned from Reno, 8/3, but it just didn't happen. I had other things going on and well, it wasn't a priority. Our RSVP date is 9/5, so this week really was my last possible week to get them out to our guests. Our blue box on the corner is currently holding my little gems!

Without further ado... may I introduce our INVITATIONS! We made 102.

I'll take you through as they would be received.
The envelope with our final address label (it went through a lot of plain versions).
As you open the invitation, you'd see our stamp, the best $26 Nolan and I ever spent! It includes Kirch, Nolan's last name, both mine and his first initial and the tree that we'll be married under. See my post about our venue here.
As you open the envelope:

You are NOT mistaken, those are envelope liners! They were made from Hallmark wrapping paper, that I was in love with! It just fit! I was more than excited when Nolan volunteered to cut and paste them into our envelops too! He's so helpful! One roll made about 40 liners, we used 2 rolls, deciding that his boys wouldn't care about our hard work, so they didn't end up with lined envelopes! This was such a huge thing for me, it only cost $4 a roll and made a gigantic impact in my opinion!
The contents taken out: Again our tree appears on the actual invitation. Embroidery thread kept the content together so nothing was missed or left behind in the envelope. I was originally going to do one or two colors but when I got to the thread aisle, I was overwhelmed and excited to incorporate a few colors. Half of the invites had our red color and half orange, but all with the neutrals. I personally love the orange color! I went through 5 groups of the 4 colors. The circle says: "Kindly reply by September 5, 2009." I originally thought it would be neat to have each person's name on the circles, but that became pretty daunting task and I decided to do our RSVP date instead.

The contents from the back:

The contents include a RSVP post card and travel info with directions. If the guests were invited to the rehearsal, I included a 3x4 card with the pertinent info, time, date, and location.
The RSVP card:

I was inspired by a Martha Stewart idea early on. This RSVP post card was one of the first decisions we made. I couldn't be more pleased with how it turned out. Of course now it's just exciting to be receiving them all back. In a future post I will display how creative some of our guests have been; think stickers, drawings, magazine-clipping-collages!
The travel info:
I got this idea from weddingbee.com. Mrs. Joey inspired me to learn more about Lake Tahoe and include some hidden treasures, great restaurants, places for drinks, hotels, events, beaches, facts, and all sorts of activities!
Early on, about 5 months ago, I sent out an email to avid Tahoe goers and got their input for the 50 things, other items were based on my input and the internet's! It was fun to put together, but a pain to print. Kinkos printed the color side and I printed the other side to save some money. I didn't end up printing enough to include in all invitations, so if I knew for sure some recipients were NOT going to make it, I excluded it from their invitation.

The entire invitation suite: