When we got married over nineteen years ago, my husband and I wanted to make our wedding as special and unique as we were as a couple. We not only wanted it to be a day that we would remember always, but one that our guests would also talk about for years. So we put a lot of time, thought, and energy into everything about our big day, including pre-wedding and post-wedding activities. (Well to be honest, I did most of the work, but he was a good sport, and like it or not, he had input on all of our decisions!)
One of the first things we did (after we booked the church, minister, reception hall, and photographer) was to decide on wedding invitations. We went to a local print shop to look at their scrapbooks of possible invitations. But nothing there grabbed me so we went to another print shop, and another. I began to get very discouraged, and worried. How would we ever find just the right invitation?
While the invitations we saw in the scrapbooks were fine, I knew they’d already been chosen by hundreds of couples before us. And they just didn’t suit us as a couple. They were traditional and somewhat boring, something I didn’t think we were! What we wanted was something that would truly be one of a kind, and reflect our personalities and commitment as a couple.
Just when I’d about given up hope, my mother told us about a friend who designed her own note cards and did graphic design. My mother wrote the copy for the note cards, and wondered if maybe her friend would be interested in doing our invitations. Mom arranged for us to meet with her about doing our invitations, though her friend had never done wedding invitations before, she was interested in trying.
We met with her about nine months before our wedding to talk about what we wanted. We knew we wanted the invitations to match the colors of our wedding (lavender and silver) and we wanted to write our own wording on them. We also wanted a unique design on the front (our invitations folded in half) so she created several designs for us to choose from. We also were given several choices of fonts, types of paper, envelopes, and response cards. Our next visit with her included several choices of invitations that she had mocked up after talking to us about what we wanted. We were thrilled with all of them, and actually had a difficult time choosing which one we liked best, which was a wonderful position to be in! In the end we both gravitated toward one invitation, fortunately it was the same one that we both loved best. And she then got to work on ordering them mass produced invitations, envelopes, response cards, more envelopes. She even did the invitation for our wedding shower, which matched the overall theme of the wedding invitations.
She made about a dozen extra invitation sets for us as a keepsake, which I keep in a box in my cedar chest to this day. I keep one set in our wedding album, and I like to take it out occasionally to look at, usually after I’ve received a ‘run of the mill’ invitation in the mail to someone else’s wedding so I can compare them. And every time I look at them I smile, and wonderful memories are called to mind.
All these years later, it's much easier to have wedding invitations designed specially for you, as there are many more professionals who are in business to create them. It may take some time, effort, and extra expense, but I’ve never regretted having invitations personally made for my wedding. It’s definitely worth considering!
