Bride-to-be Blogger Stephanie: Picking Out Our Invitations

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By the end of our appointment, my mom and I had dissected—literally with a scissors—three sample invitations and combined them into one. The finished product: stunning.

We had been at the Paper Umbrella for nearly four hours (who knew it was possible to stare at invitations for four hours?!). We had searched through dozens of books and still hadn’t quite found one that was really jumping out at us.

Two things were clear: I love texture, and I love sheen. And there were a number of invitation templates with these elements but not quite the right mix.

My goal in this process was to find an invitation that my mom loved and that I could love. My mom is rather passionate about invitations, so this was a pick-your-battles type situation. Since it’s not my number one priority, I wasn’t going to fight my mom on anything she fell in love with. That being said, I was still hoping to have a say and possibly encourage a more modern, interesting twist to the super traditional invites my mom was favoring.

When we first went to look at engagement party invites and save the dates, we quickly browsed through some of the wedding invitation books, and I was puzzled by how my mom fawned over the simplest invitations: all white, really thick card stock, black writing. There was nothing wrong with them. They were very pretty, but in my opinion, totally boring.

This time around, Paper Umbrella’s Linda knew where to start with me, pulling out the “different” book first; no feathers were involved, no neon fonts, still rather traditional, but the book contained invitations with unique patterns and textures.

Right away, my Mom and I found one we liked. It quickly turned into a benchmark. Linda would ask, “Well, do you like it better than the first? No, okay. Let’s move on.”

In the end, none of the other invitations compared to the initial invite that caught our eye. But it was still falling a little flat. It was then that our creative juices kicked in, we got out the scissors, and we started creating our own – combing elements from three different invitations.

With an embellished ribbon and a different font color, the initial invite transformed into something pretty spectacular. Once put together, my mom gasped she loved it so much. It was striking—elegant and formal (what my mom wanted) yet with more interesting, with modern accents (what I wanted). Maybe not what I originally envisioned, but my mom loved it and frankly, so did I.

Before committing to anything, I wanted to make sure Pat was okay with it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long, as he was home for the weekend and anxiously waiting for me to get back—wondering how on earth an appointment could take this long.

I was a bit worried he wasn’t going to like it, but thankfully, he did. Little enthusiasm due to a general lack of interest in invitations, but my sister made up for it. When I showed it to her, she said very matter-of-factly, “It’s perfect.” It’s just what I needed to hear.

Did choosing your invitations take a lot more time and effort than you thought? How did you end up with a design that made you and everybody else happy?

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