A bit about our invitations.

The process of making the invitations was harder than we expected. To save some money and add a little bit of a personal touch, we decided to do them ourselves. Indeed, we saved quite a bit of money, since in the end all we had to pay for was postage.

There were several iterations of design that came into play before we decided on our little flamingos.

The first was this design, a single card using a palm tree photo that Caitlin took on her trip to Costa Rica.

Billy hated this design, and it was immediately discarded.

We both really liked this one, and in fact almost used it until we went to visit the site again and realized that it didn't fit the personality of the island. After that trip, we came up with the next idea, which finally shows signs of our final design. As a side note, the orchid in the invitation above is from a photo we took of the very first orchid we ever grew together, so it had some sentimental value in it as well.

This was our working design for most of the process, but in the end it was too busy and cluttered. It features a map of the island where we're getting married as well as our beloved flamingos. It is informal and fun, which is exactly what we're going for with our whole wedding. Finally, Caitlin sat down with pen and paper and came up with the flamingo drawing that is now apparently going to be our trademark.

We went with a folded card, mainly because we already had them. Caitlin inherited them from her dad, who collected all sorts of art supplies in his day, and adds a little touch of him to the wedding as well. The invites were ultimately designed using a combination of Photoshop and InDesign (we downloaded a free 30-day trial of InDesign for this purpose, which added a whole other dimension to the design process; nothing like being on the clock while you're also working full time, in school, babysitting twice a week, and planning a wedding). They took 16 straight hours to print at the highest setting on our printer.

We also ended up changing the wording of the invites slightly at the bottom. Again, we were going for fun and informal so we ended up with, "Dinner and dancing under the Sandbar pavilion follow for all who wish to boogie with the bride and groom!" Because for sure we are gonna be boogie-ing.

Another component of the invites was the website, which was such a production, mainly because Caitlin had no idea what she was doing during the whole process. At first the whole site was built using thousands and thousands of jpeg files, which is death to all websites if someone happens to not have high-speed access to the internet. We finally ended up with what is there today. We purposely chose a neutral-sounding URL so that we could continue using it after the wedding, updating it with photos and stories as we continue our lives together.

Finally, the response cards. We mentioned that they were all to be hand-written. We bought 77 postcards from a gift shop in Florida and then wrote all the responses ourselves. They were all personalized depending on the guest, and took Caitlin about three hours to do. Her hand may or may not still be cramped. But the end result was great. The postcards cost about $10.

In all, we spent about three solid months working on the invites at varying degrees of pulling our hair out, but we wouldn't give up the process for anything! In the end, we're in love with our little flamingos. And now we have a mascot!