I haven’t written in awhile, but that’s because I’ve been busy GETTING MARRIED and going on my honeymoon! The wedding was completely perfect thanks to all my amazing vendors and so, so much fun! I will share more of the details of the wedding day throughout my upcoming blog posts but I first want to talk about some of the planning that happened before the wedding. Since we were married only three months after our engagement, I am just a tad bit behind on updating all of you. To get you up to speed, at this point in my story, I have chosen the photographer, the venue, and my wedding dress.
When planning a wedding in three months, one of the first things I had to start thinking about was the invitations. As with most brides I imagine we all go back and forth between custom invitations and generic invitations since there are many places online that make quality invitations. I was one of these brides. The one thing I did know is that if I were to do custom invitations, Madeline from MLC Designs would be designing them. I have known Madeline for years and she is a good friend, but more importantly, her custom invitations are simply stunning. Every invite I have seen from her (and I have seen a lot through the years) has been creative, gorgeous, and perfectly tailored to the event.
The first thing I did was email Madeline to find out if custom invitations were even a possibility for my budget. Even though I live and breath this industry, until I started planning my own wedding, I honestly had no idea of prices outside of photography. In the meantime, I started looking online for invitations. I found many designs that I thought were beautiful but in each of these designs I wanted to change at least one thing that made it specific to my wedding and my taste . . . and I couldn’t change it. I knew I wanted gold foil and to include my other colors, blush and marsala. This was a hard combination to find. If I did find this color combination, the formatting or font wasn’t exactly what I was looking for or the paper wasn’t the best quality. My search for online invitations started to become a little frustrating. Meanwhile, Madeline emailed me back and told me in a friend-to-friend way, “No way am I letting you order invitations online.” And that was that. Custom invitations it was.
I had my first meeting with Madeline a couple of days later while my sister was in town. We talked about the vibe of the wedding, my style and taste, and looked at paper samples. It was great to be able to ask her opinion on things since I was undecided about some parts of the invitation. I really had no idea there would be so many decisions to make. Based on our conversation, Madeline came back the next week with several different design themes for me to choose between. It was definitely hard to choose because I loved all of them. I finally picked one and made one minor change to the initial design. It was great knowing that unlike the online invitations, I could make changes if I wanted. But of course, since we had talked about my style and tastes beforehand, Madeline understood what I wanted and was designing the invitations specifically for my wedding. I think we had the save the dates in the mail a week after meeting with her. And the invitations went out about a month later. Madeline even matched my welcome basket cards and my thank you cards to my invitations.
Everyone says that invitations are the first impression your guests will have of your wedding and after this experience, I agree with this statement 100%. I was talking to one of my Kansas friends yesterday who wasn’t able to come to the wedding because her parents had already planned a trip to visit her from England (one of the downfalls of getting married so quickly . . . sometimes people already have set plans). Anyway, she said when the invitation arrived her husband was standing right there and they both looked at each other and he said, “I want to go to that wedding!” The word “obsessed” was used by another friend. One of my friends even posted an Instagram post about the invitations. These are just a few of the many positive comments I heard about the invitations. There were many more :).
Obviously no matter what the wedding is like, people want to attend because they are close with you and want to celebrate this special time in your lives. But an awesome invitation just gives them a little extra incentive. I am SO happy Madeline made me see the light because working with her, I was able to get exactly what I wanted and didn’t have to make compromises. It was DEFINITELY worth the extra money.
