EZ Wedding: Our Custom Laser Cut Invitations

I have tried to enjoy (or at least not stress during) our wedding planning process. My enjoyment has been heightened by several wedding components that just fell into place in the perfect way with perfect timing. One such item was the wedding invitations.

Invitations set the atmosphere and theme of the wedding, as they are the introduction to your wedding for the guests. We wanted our invitations to reflect us and our casual, fun vision of the wedding. After looking at many of the mainstream invitation sites, we quickly became a little disheartened with the lack of truly custom options. I looked through lots of Etsy invitations in search of something we could customize, and John emailed several small businesses to see what we could design through them. However, the more research we did, the more we felt that DIY invitations were the only way to get exactly what we wanted with a reasonable cost. At the time, we did not have a clear visualization of the design, but we wanted the overall feel to be something casual, inclusive of our color palette, tri fold, and with some xtracycle element. (We plan to ride our xtracycle radish away from the church.)

John was all for the huge DIY project, but I felt nervous about attempting to make our own invitations for several reasons. The first being that I am neither crafty nor a perfectionist, two skills that are helpful in such a huge task requiring straight lines. While John is most definitely a perfectionist, he sometimes needs a little prodding to actually finish projects. We also lack any significant design experience. John attempted to make a bicycle wheel in Photoshop one afternoon and it took him three hours (I still maintain that it looked more like a wagon wheel than a bike wheel). Designing a bike graphic in addition to the typography and text layout would have been a massive undertaking. Topping it all off, we were planning for 150 guests which translates to at least 100 invitations. Even calling in local family and friends for reinforcements, assembly alone would still have taken an entire weekend.

When I began to accept the colossal DIY project looming ahead, I stumbled across this Green Wedding Shoes post, and fell in love with their unique invitations. John and I immediately found the invitation designer, Sarah Holbrook at Candyspotting, and pulled up the website. We were immediately captivated by her Everyday Magic design, with its fun, casual feel incorporating the tri fold construction and the bicycle. This prompted an email from John to Sarah titled, “Your Amazing Cards and Our Amazing Wedding.”  This email thread now contains 42 email exchanges covering the design and printing process of our custom laser cut invitations.

Working with Sarah, we were able to provide design input, without having to do much (or any) work, and we received the perfect invitation for us and our wedding. We sent her pictures of our view of the Charlotte skyline and the xtracycle for her to incorporate in the design, and she sent us back draft images throughout the process. About a month into the process, we realized our tagline “Forever Starts 10/12/13” was the perfect addition to the front of the invitations, and Sarah accommodated our request almost immediately. I think it adds so much to the invites.

John and I loved working with Sarah, and would recommend Candyspotting to anyone, whether you have a concrete design or a general idea. We gave her our criteria, and she asked us lots of questions in order to develop a design that was perfectly us. We made a few changes as the design evolved, and loved the synergy as we relied on her expertise in choosing key elements such as colors, paper texture, and print area. Additionally, I have to mention that Sarah is the most email responsive vendor that we have worked with so far; I appreciated that she always hit reply all so I was included in the email chain (I rarely initiate anything wedding related).

We were so excited to send these out, and have received such positive feedback from our guests. We hope that our wedding reflects us and our life together here in Charlotte, and these invitations are a perfect start.

This picture better captures the true colors of the invitations