Lyre Invitations

Over the past few weeks, our invitations have been sent and received, the responses are rolling in - so it's time to show you guys the Lyre invitations!

First, we decided to go with a calligrapher.  My handwriting leaves much to be desired, and I wanted to get darker envelopes, so printing was out.  Once we found Carmela of Custom Calligraphy, we knew we had found the answer! Besides doing beautiful work, she is so unbelievably affordable, it's a win-win situation. We got so many compliments on the calligraphy alone, it was the best decision we could have made!

Front of envelope 

Not only did Carmela do a great job on the addresses (despite being without power for almost a week during Hurricane Sandy, too!), she also did our return address on every single invitation in her gorgeous calligraphy:

Return address 

 When our guests opened their invitation and pulled out their bundle, this is what they saw:

Once they took it apart, this is what they had:

The Lyre invitation suite

Now for the details:  

I toyed briefly with the idea of learning Adobe Illustrator over the summer and designing our own invitations, but after a very frustrating ordeal with a single flourish, I opted to leave it to the professionals. We ordered letterpress invitations by Delphine, in the April design with Graceful font throughout the entire invitation. The designs were a dark gray, and the text in a lighter gray.  We chose traditional wording, and had our initials instead of our wedding date or monogram added to the top flourish. 

Our response cards were also letterpressed, with traditional wording and the same font and text/design colors as our invitation.

Our information card was flat printed in the same style but with the colors reversed to make it stand out among the letterpressed items. 

Not part of our invitation suite, but we also ordered flat printed cards personalized with our names to use for future wedding correspondence. 

When it came time to mail these, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they weighed exactly one ounce! This meant we could use a forever stamp instead of a 65 cent stamp or two forever stamps. I was super paranoid about this and had it weighed three times, at three separate post offices, just to make sure. I went with the cherry blossom stamps because I liked the way it looked against the gray envelopes. 

 On November 8th, I hauled 110 stuffed envelopes into Philadelphia, to the B. Free Franklin Post Office in Philadelphia, where they hand cancel every single item that goes through their post office.  

The B. Free Franklin Post Office, photo via wikipedia

The first 50 are free, and then it's 5 cents an envelope after that. It's the only post office in the entire United States to use the Ben Franklin stamp, and I thought it was so fitting for our Philadelphia wedding that will take place only 2 blocks away from this post office! I'm sure no one even noticed, but for me it was worth the $3.50 to get this back in the mail: 

Hand canceled stamp from B. Free Franklin Post Office

We haven't had a single returned envelope, although we do fear that some got lost in the mail. As of a week ago one of my bridesmaids hadn't received hers yet, but fingers crossed it will still turn up!

So there you have it, the Lyre invitation suite down to the stamps. Our invitations were a bit of splurge in some regards, but still cost well under the projected cost for letterpress invitations (thank goodness for Groupons!)

Did anyone else splurge a bit on their invitations?