Wedding Shower Invites

I have the great honor of being a bridesmaid in my brother-in-laws upcoming wedding. He is marrying the most wonderful woman named Angela, who I cannot wait to have as part of my family! As the clock ticks down to the June wedding, we have ordered dresses, are thinking about hair and shoes, are planning the bachelorette party, and of course the wedding shower.

When my mother-in-law broached the subject of the wedding shower invites, I eagerly volunteered for invite duty. I absolutely adore stationary, and I even DIY’d my entire set of wedding invites.

DIY however was a bit out of the question for the shower invites. I just didn’t have the time.  DIYing invites is a HUGE commitment. I did however want something that was a bit more special than “could-have-been-done-on-my-home-printer” invites. I also wanted to make sure I stuck to a more casual invite, as the wedding is set in a vineyard barn. With rustic (yet polished) in mind, I set out shower invite sourcing. You can see some of my wedding shower ideas on my Bridal Shower Pinterest Board here.

 

Follow Kristen – Storefront Life’s board Bridal Shower on Pinterest.

 

After a ton of searching and waffling (too many good options!) I finally settled on the Delightful Bridal Shower invite from Minted, and it couldn’t be more perfect.

Minted Bridal Shower Invite

Minted Delightful Bridal Shower Invite

The invite is a lovely kraft cardstock front with a white backing. I upgraded for a few of the additional add-ons including die cut corners. I think they add a ton of interest to the invites, and up the custom factor.

Minted Bridal Shower Invite

I also opted for more information and a photo of the bride & groom printed on the back of the invite (it’s from their engagement session. Super cute.) We went with a light blue as the accent color, as it is the brides favorite color.

Minted Bridal Shower Invite

I fell in love with the kraft envelopes, and went for printed return addresses. I also used the new service from Minted for envelope addressing. Can I just say how much of a help it is to have envelopes addressed? I have terrible hand writing. It would have taken me ages to address all the envelopes, and they would have looked like rubbish. So glad I went for the addressing. You have several options for return and address designs and fonts. I wanted something a bit vintage/rustic to match the invites.

 

Minted Bridal Shower Invite envelope

Minted Bridal Shower envelope addressing

The addresses were easy to upload. I downloaded their excel template, filled in everyone’s addresses, and uploaded the spreadsheet. It also keeps the address info in your account, so for instance if you sent save the dates, it would already know your guest addresses for when you sent your wedding invites. I would have died for that when I was working on my own wedding invites. I actually laid out the type for every single envelope (inner and outer) and hand fed them through my inkjet printer.

In the end it took me about a week to decide on a design, get the addresses, input my info, and place my order. It only took a few days for the order to ship, and arrive at my house. The whole suite came together beautifully.

Minted Bridal Shower Invite

I hope the bride likes them! Cant wait for the shower, and the lovely June wedding!

 

Disclosure: We worked with Minted for these absolutely awesome invites. As always, all opinions, typos and overuses of the word “awesome” are my own.

 

 

Wedding Week – Invitations

Just like the Save the Dates, we wanted to Letterpress our Invitation Suite. We decided to go all out for the invites, and do double envelopes, double thick cardstock, a double sided invitation with a blind deboss on the back, two enclosures as well as our friend the wax seal.

This time we smartened up, and had all our paper custom cut from letterpresspaper.com . We had it shipped to family in the US (to avoid the crazy UPS brokerage fees) and my Dad drove over and picked it up for us. We designed our invites in Illustrator and had the plates made at Boxcar Press.

I wanted to use blind impression somehow for the invitation suite, and decided to do a pattern debossed on the back of the double thick invites. My L Letterpress is incredibly good at doing blind impressions, so we pre-blind printed the backs of the invites, before heading to Snap & Tumble‘s studio to print with ink.

Where printing the Save the Date‘s took a few hours, printing the invite suite took two FULL days. We then cut out envelope liners using our Silhouette SD. This was a godsend. We could NOT have cut that many liners (and maintained our sanity) without it. We used some wrapping paper with stamps of the Queen on it (a nod to El Granto’s British heritage). We didn’t have enough to do all the invites with that paper, so we mixed it up with some pretty black wrapping paper for the rest of the liners.

We also designed a belly band to keep the invite suite together. We had a local print shop cut 1″ strips of our letterpress paper, and we blind debossed the same pattern onto them as on the back of the invites. We scored them, wrapped them around the invite suite and secured with a glue dot. The whole thing was then stuffed into the lined and addressed inner envelopes, and then into the outer envelopes. They were wax sealed, stamped and mailed. (Envelopes were addressed by printing each one individually on our Epson Inkjet printer using Illustrator for the typesetting.)

We were very pleased with our DIY effort, although it was a LOT of work. By far the most time consuming part of the wedding planning!

The Invitation Pieces
The Envelopes

Source Info:

Paper: Crane Lettra 220lbs for invites (A7), 110lbs for rsvp & info cards (4 bar)
Envelopes: Crane Lettra (A7 inner & outer, pointed for invites, and 4 bar pointed for rsvp) – letterpresspaper.com
Letterpress Plates: KF95 Photopolymer Plates – Boxcar Press
Wax: Glue Gun wax in black & “S” seal stamp – www.letterseals.com
Fonts: Ecuyer Dax & Burgues Script
Letterpress Printing: PIY (Print it Yourself) time at Snap & Tumble