Reception Invite

Hard to believe it's been over half a year since our reception. Dang...time flies!! I've been meaning to do a post about our invitation for our wedding reception for months. A few things have been keeping me busy like, house hunting/buying/moving/renovating, having a baby, going back to work...and the business of everyday life that seems to get in the way of what you originally set out to do. But, things are settling down a little bit more now. Going back to work has put the routine back into my life that was completely lost on maternity leave. I miss being home with my baby, but being here means that I have the luxury of checking email or posting on this blog—things that go on the back burner when I return to Hamco at the end of a workday. So, once again, I am going to try and post with some regularity to this little blog o' mine.

So back to the invite.

My husband and I eloped in June, 2010. We chose the tiki gardens of the historic Mai Kai in Ft. Lauderdale. It had everything we wanted. A cool destination, historic significance, unique setting and built in entertainment, plus a-MAZING cocktails (of course, I couldn't enjoy having recently discovering I was pregnant)! I don't remember this, but apparently the last (and only) time I was there, I told my travel pals that I wanted to get married there. Premonition? Maybe. It was perfection. Eloping has a small guest list. A couple of our closest friends joined us as our Best Man and Matron of Honor, but that was it. No family, no other friends...just the four of us.

So we wanted to have a reception when we returned. We chose another historic location for our reception, Cliff Bell's Jazz Club in Detroit.

Since the two venues had very little in common, I wanted an invite that sort of tied the feeling of the Mai Kai and our tiki wedding in with our brunch. Using the Mai Kai mug as my inspiration, I created a barrel shaped invite. I had found a terrific local photographer on Craigslist, who's work seemed to elude to her ability to capture the events exactly the way I wanted (and she did an amazing job! www.daniellerphotography.com), so I incorporated her image and a few other Mai Kai, beachy, tiki items into the design. Once again, I relied on my trusty (ahem) die-cutter to contour cut the barrel shape. I added tiki drink stirrers to every invite so that they would look like a cocktail when folded with the stirrer sticking out. I used regular bright white Hammermill 100 lb. cardstock for the invites and chose French Dur-o-tone paper for the envelopes and ran everything through the Xerox Phaser 7750 (god I love those printers!).

Originally I chose French Parchtone in Natural for the invites, but due to the ink coverage on the laser printer, the paper was completely obscured under the printing, so instead I used that paper to make a guest book and thank you tags for the deserts/parting gift. Everything had a nice, aged and rustic look to it, which was exactly what I had wanted. The hawaiian and tiki clip art are downloads from French.com as well. Gotta love French!

I was super happy with the results of the invite and the party. Next time I'll use a padded envelope, as a few of the stirrers suffered the wrath of the automated machinery at the post office. Guests were super impressed by their invites and the souvenir stirrer added a little novelty.