Invitations: Willow (not the movie staring the little person.)

When we started budgeting for the wedding, one category we thought we'd cut back in is stationary. Who keeps all those save the dates, initiations, reception cards, place cards, thank you cards, you are welcome cards, etc? Besides me, of course. I had looked at a number of magazines when Allison was getting married and I thought I liked the simple cards with a border around them.

Chris and I looked at The American Wedding stationary, first. (www.theamericanwedding.com) We ordered several free samples and decided on the "Perfect Pastel" invitation. In the picture the one that looks blue is actually a sage green. It had the border I had mentioned and the price was right. We checked that off our "to do" list.

THEN... thanks to my obsession with every website to do with weddings, I stumbled upon Minted.com. This website specializes in high quality, designer invitations. Chris was psyched because the website was totally designed with the tech savy man in mind. It has a search engine with check boxes that will search their offerings to meet your specifications. He was quite impressed. In further investigation, we found a few invitations that had the woodsy/manzanita theme (more on that later!) that we are going for. We ordered the samples and we were more than pleasantly surprised when they arrived. We had to pay $7 a sample, highway robbery! NOT! The payment is a credit to our final purchase; score us.
It's all about presentation! As you can see, the samples came in a clear envelope that was tied with a green ribbon. Inside, along with the samples, was a note from Rick K. who had packaged and shipped the order. These samples/invitations do not even compare to the ones from The American Wedding, sorry! Chris and I quickly fell in love with the Willow design by Cat Seto.
Here the invitation is pictured with the all of the accent colors in teal. Our invitations will be printed with the teal replaced with sage. What you might not be able to see is that on some of the sporatic branches there are little Swarovski crystals in the accent color, bling bling! The branches are twisty and have flowers which mimic our quasi-rustic decor. The paper is a heavy card stock. Quality. Unfortunately, quality means money. (sad face) To keep the cost down, we are going to print the RSVP and reception cards ourselves. Thank the technology gods for high quality scanners and Illustrator!!