Not the Invitation Post You're Looking For

As I was thinking about something to blog about yesterday, I realized that I have not blogged about my invitations. I'm warning you now, everyone, that this is not going to be the usual Weddingbee invitation post. I'll again be up front with you....I'm not into paper. I think it's pretty just not enough to make a major investment of time (making invites or paper products myself) or money (dropping loot on  letterpress). 

With my uncraftiness and a decision to keep things streamlined and simple, this thinking spilled over into my search for invitations. I knew I wanted to keep things looking very modern, simple and full of color, which is essentially what our wedding will be. That meant I tried to look for invites with no birds, flowers, plants, bows, yadda, yadda, yadda. I was thoroughly surprised at how hard it is to find invitations without these elements in this day and age. Almost every invitation out there has one of those elements. If anything, with that criteria at least it made it easy to narrow things down! I was also not concerned about letterpress, engraving or pretty much how they were printed as long as the cardstock was at least substantial. 

Also against current convention, I did not want multiple inserts, pocketfolds or an RSVP card. Part of that was motivated by a desire to be "green" (we are paper recycling fiends in the Swan household) and to maintain part of the underlying goal of our planning which is to (say it with me, everybody) "Keep it simple!" Instead of an RSVP card, we included a small insert with our RSVP date, an e-mail address and telephone number for our guests to respond, and also a mention of our wedding website on My Wedding. 

During my search, I found myself on Etsy as usual and was totally attracted to Eva Paul Design (they apparently do photography too), a husband and wife team who have modern whimsy down to a science. While I was a little apprehensive about not getting a physical sample of my specific invite (they do send samples but not customized ones), I pulled a Whitley Gilbert "Relax, Relate, Release" and figured that it would be okay. It was! 

By the way, before I write about my invites, here are some samples of EvaPaul's work.

Say hello to the Denise invite

(source)

Tres Cute. I know it has birds, but it's so darn cute!

Mia

(source)

They do Save The Dates too. Here's one of the new ones, Bianca.

(source)

I love the bicycles!!

For me, Nic and Kirsten tranformed their Carly invite from this:

(source)

to this:

(w00 hoo for little strips of paper!)

Simple with bold color and just what I wanted

Here's our RSVP insert:

(Sorry for the blurriness but you get the idea)

I was pleased with the invitations, and so far we have gotten nice feedback from many people on our somewhat unintended  "green" invitations. 

Anyone else following our "Keep it simple!" philosophy with invites or any other aspect of the wedding?