Invites: Months in the Making

When I first got engaged, a friend pulled me aside and told me that there are a lot of expenses in a wedding and, in order to stay sane, to ignore all of the hoopla -- except for one thing. She told me to focus in on one thing that was important and splurge. She said I'll be glad I did.

Well, I decided I wanted cute custom letterpress invitations. I mean, we are only inviting family, so it couldn't possibly cost that much. Well, folks, yes it can! Once I processed the sticker shock, I decided letterpress was out, as was a totally custom design.

Luckily, I found a very lovely San Francisco themed invitation through Hello Lucky. Sure, the letterpress version was well out of reasonable price range, but the digital version was OK and I couldn't resist the quirky, simple theme.

Even though the invites aren't a custom design, I felt like there was enough decision-making involved as it was. Paper type, ink color, wording, envelope color, label color, etc. I set up a time for Travis and I to visit Hello Lucky in person. They're right here in San Francisco, so we swung by after work one Friday.

We had a lovely and short appointment where Stewey helped us out even though we weren't going full custom. He pointed us in the right direction and gave us some take home samples. We also got to see the letterpress(es) in action!

We headed home and that weekend committed to the purchase of invites, RSVP cards and labels. Luckily, we'd already asked our moms (thanks, moms!) to compile addresses of all family invited. I make it sound easy. It actually took months to get our addresses together, but, in the end, I'm so glad we had labels made for us. It helped round out the look of the invites!

Hello Lucky is an online stationary shop so we customized and ordered all online. Travis was in charge!


After numerous proofs, exchanges with the very patient Lillian at HL and final confirmations, we finally received our invitations about a month or so later. It was very exciting to open up our box and see the invitations in real life.


We purchased cheesy ring stamps (they were out of the King/Queen of Hearts stamps -- darn!), affixed and mailed off our lovely invitations last week, 3 months to the day before our Big Day! While we didn't really splurge on the invites, I'm glad we spent so much time on them. They turned out perfect.