Wedding Invitation Reveal

The RSVP cards in my mailbox and comments from friends confirm that our invitations are in our guests' hands, so it's time to share some pictures!

First of all, I have to comment on how amazing my local post office is.  Up until about a year ago, my little city had its own mail sorting facility.  Budget cuts prompted a closure and all mail started getting sent to Richmond (about an hour away) to be sorted.  Locals were up in arms over the potential change in delivery time. I was pretty surprised when we mailed our Save the Date cards and a local friend had his in less than 24 hours.  I remember thinking that the Richmond sorting facility must be super efficient!

When I went to double check the postage that we'd need for our invitations, I became privy to what's really going on at my local post office.  After I bought our stamps, the clerk quietly told me to separate out the local invitations from the rest so they could bypass Richmond and stay in town.  Apparently, they've been doing some hand sorting at the post office since our local sorting facility closed.  They aren't supposed to do this, but it's clearly more efficient and probably saves money since they don't have as much mail to transport.

I dropped our invitations off around 1 PM on a Wednesday and many local guests received them on Thursday.  My family in the northeast had invitations by Saturday, which is when the first responses arrived in our mailbox.  I'm so happy with our quickly the USPS delivered everything.

Now, let me show off our invitations!  You may remember the wonderful, affordable calligraphy that Elizabeth Bartucci did for me, but it's so pretty that I can't help sharing another picture of the envelopes.

I've already shared the outside of our envelopes.  We used cherry blossom centennial stamps on the envelopes as a nod to the region and our ties to Thomas Jefferson.  For the return address, we used wrap around labels from Minted that had our first names on the back of them.

I bought envelope liners that complimented our invitation design from Minted and used a tape runner to secure them inside the envelopes. 

Inside the envelopes, the different parts of our invitation were tied together with some thin, pink ribbon.  We followed what seem to have become a bit of a Weddingbee tradition and used a Moo card to direct guests to our wedding website.

Our invitation design is Banner and Branches by Alethea and Ruth (via Minted).  I saw the design over a year ago and fell in love with it.  I ordered samples of Banner and Branches along with two other designs and Marc preferred one of the other ones.  I decided that I would let him make the decision since there were apt to be others during our planning where my preference would dictate an outcome.  He must have sensed that I wasn't thrilled with his chosen design because a day later, he said that he appreciated the gesture, but he wasn't really passionate about the paper the way I was.  He was far more concerned with reception details (food and music). Our Banner and Branches invitations were ordered within hours.

The one concern I had about our invitations was the fact that I couldn't get meal selections onto the reply card.  I didn't think to ask Minted if the design of the card could be altered and when we ordered our invitations, our venue hadn't established a spring menu yet.  So, we decided to handle meal selection online.

The Moo card says "Please visit our wedding website http://________.com for meal selection, directions, and lodging information."   So far, it's working quite well!  I considered moving the RSVP online, but I love the fact that most of the cards we've gotten so far have had a personal note on them.  Last night, we couldn't help but get a little emotional over the card that one of my relatives sent.  The reply card notes feel like little hugs from our guests. 

Did you put some component of the RSVP online?  How did it work out for you?