the innards and gizzards

on the heels of my last post, lets see what two rounds of revisions has yielded in production shall we?

i know i didn't technically give birth to you, but you were still a labor of love! (please excuse the ugliness that i used to block out some info)

respondez sil vous plait!

chinese bakery cards and directions (yea sorry dudes, not everyone gets the chinese sweet stuff, only certain guests on the brides guestlist gets these, ie auntie lulu and uncle jack)

all bundled up with a double sided satin ribbon

ready for the mail!

the font for our names on the invitations is carpenter calligraphy by Laura and the envelopes were actually printed through my printer (man this is another story i will have to post later) with the font English... i thought they're pretty sweet lookin, what do YOU think? do i pass muster?

Wedding invitations at last

After a lot of hemming and hawing i decided to go with lucky orchid wedding invitations by Laura Hooper. The woman is a genius, not only is her calligraphy something awesome, her line of invitations are absolutely beautiful.

i didn't go the DIY route with this because, lets face it, i'm really just not that talented and to attempt such a huge project on my own is a disaster in the making. plan A was to order invitations on mygatsby.com because well i didn't want to spend a whole lot of money and the designs were very nice...but ultimately i wasn't happy with the paper quality, it wasn't as heavy as i would've liked and there was very little i can do to customize it to make it my own. so i gave myself a new budget and started looking up alternatives on thermographically printed wedding invitations on substantially weighted paper and Laura Hooper came to my rescue.

so without further ado, lets take you back a couple of months when i received THIS in the mail:

can this be?OMG! IT IS! IT IS! MY FREAKIN WEDDING INVITATIONS!

God it's like opening a present at Christmas! TEEHEEOMG OMG OMG!
It's even wrapped so prettily! Laura Hooper i love thee!

i know i know, you wanna see what this baby looks like dontcha? DONTCHA?

sweet jesus

the invitations are going to print! eek!

DIY failure? judge for yourself

alright, so long ago i proclaimed myself a DIY dummie...but because of the time crunch there was just no way i was going to be able to get my save the dates professionally printed...so i had to resort to Do it yourself-dom...it was torture...or i'm just a baby in reality, but considering all pain asides...i thought they turned out quite well...majority of them came out the way i had envisioned...so lets begin shall we?

after our engagement session with Ryan, it took about 3 weeks for me to get the pictures and then to choose a few that i thought would make a good magnet, and then sent them off to Luke for some graphical magic...i loved what he did, and it matched my engagement party invitations! i then sent the artwork out to vista print for magnets to be printed...

this is what they're supposed to look like

these are what came back, actually lets get a close up look
the borders were all cut off a bit...the artwork was formatted so that they were supposed to fit the dimensions of the magnet perfectly, but for whatever reason this didn't work out, but i was too pressed for time to get them reprinted and redone , so i had to make peace with imperfect save the dates...but otherwise the picture quality and color satuation was pretty good i thought...

i then designed a card for these suckers to be mounted to on microsoft word, yes as in the program you used to write those school papers on...no photoshop or some fancy shmancy program for me...this is what i came up with

i formatted the paper size to fit an A2 sized card and landscaped it and voila! insta magnet card

i then ordered some red card stock from paper source in my desired size, which was pretty easy, if i wasn't so fickle and couldn't decide what color to actually make these guys! but i settled on red in the end because well it matched the magnet and it was ON SALE! the fortunate thing was, because it was a shiny card stock, it will only work if i printed it with a laser printer...which i very conveniently have one at home

yep this is the baby that i printed everything on...seee!

the sucky part of my printer was for some reason the feeder is really dumb, so i had to hand feed every single card! yes i had to sit there and individually hand do 150 cards...painful i tell you

and of course like everything i do, there will inevitably be rejects...but not because its my fault, but because i didn't anticipate the printer being this retarded...here let me show you the handful of rejected cards

yea the printer smeared ink on the edges of a few...ugh...ok on second thought it might be my fault for not having the foresight... gah!

but all is not lost, most of them came out perfectly, like so

after all this, how the heck do i affix the magnets to the cards? double stick tape? glue dots? i tried both and they both work...but majority of them were done on glue dots, these guys

i got about 130 of them from office depot, staples didn't have them...but they made assembly easier...i got the idea from weddingbee.com mrs butterfly to design a box onto the card so i wouldn't have to worry about centering the magnets, stuck one of these guys in the box and attached magnet, VOILA! easy peasy

the final product looked like this:

stuffed into envelopes by chris and i , these babies were ready to go out.
i chickened out and printed all the addresses on clear labels instead of writing them all out, yea sue me, they're the save the dates not actual invites =P

so whats your verdict? did i pass or fail on this DIY project?

Updates

stayed tuned for i have some stuff to share!
1. save the dates are officially completed so i'll be posting on the assembly process, it was painful.
2. invitations are on their way to getting designed and printed...i changed my mind yet again, i'm no longer a my gatsby girl...so stick around for the big reveal on my new vendor ;)