Thursday, April 28, 2011

The Invites are Here - and Mostly Prepped

Hooray for invites!

We did ours through VistaPrint because they're decently priced and we got half off of everything with my Upromise account. Both of these things made nice invitations fit within our budget. That being said, you definitely get what you pay for.

This wasn't my first go-round with VistaPrint, but this was the first time I was doing a large order of a pre-designed item. I had previously designed and ordered Thank You cards from them. Even though the proofs all looked good, only one out of every four cards were cut with equal borders. The rest were either flush left or flush right. Big pain. They reprinted the cards for free, but ended up with the same issue. This time, everything appeared to be cut fine, but the printing left much to be desired.

When the recipients get their invitations, they won't be able to really tell that there's anything wrong with the invites. It's only when you see some of them next to each other that you realize only a few were printed to the color shown on the site, the rest seemed to have been printed with some of the ink running out, leaving the invites with more of a red hue than a solid grey. I hemmed and hawed over contacting VistaPrint about it, but ultimately realized that no one would notice (except for me pointing it out) and I would rather get the cards out than wait for a reprint that could ultimately end up with the same result.

That being decided, the invitations were stuffed into their envelopes and the RSVP cards were designated. All that's left to do is address the RSVP envelopes, put stamps on them, address the invitation envelopes, be sure to put the right RSVP with the right invitation, include stamps on the invitation envelopes, and then they'll be out the door!

From the moment we drop those suckers in the mailbox, I will be checking our mailbox for RSVPs. I obsess over when the mail delivery person comes when I'm expecting something, even if I realistically won't see anything for a few days or even a few weeks. It's fun expecting non-bill related mail! That, and we're really looking forward to getting a handle on what our numbers may realistically be. We won't really know until the Fall, definitely, but some RSVPs will trickle in sooner than others. My spreadsheets are fired up and ready to track who's coming and who can't make it.

We had a little fun with our RSVP wording, and hopefully folks will get a little chuckle out of them. Who knows, maybe people will get creative with their responses.

I know this is really a less interesting post. I'll try to make it up to you with another chapter of the stories behind our STD selection this weekend.

2 comments:

  1. my one piece of "wish i'd known this ahead of time" kind of advice is people suck at RSVP. your family especially sucks at RSVP.

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  2. Yeah, we've heard that from a few folks. That's kind of why we set our RSVP date at the end of July. It gives us August and September to hunt people down. We plan on having some family help us out with that part. ;-)

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