Invitation Evolution

Less than 5 weeks until my wedding. Between planning that, and just hanging around with my Canada-returned fiancee, I have not blogged.

But, as part of the wedding, I've been looking at all of the invitation responses, and thought I would give you all a taste of the evolution process that the now-beautiful invitations went through.

A family friend Pat, said she would make the cards as a wedding gift to us. She took us to an out of town craft store she knew for a little assembly/planning party to design the card. I have to say, the experience was a tad overwhelming and between us, my mom, Pat, and the store owner, I think there were too many cooks. We came up with two designs that made use of an embossed maple leaf on brown cardstock.
We came home, took another look at them, and thought, "what were we thinking?" They were nice, but too dark. Also too busy for us. Finally, she didn't like the green, and it didn't match our wedding colours (not that our wedding is heavily themed to our colours, it really isn't). So my fiancee and I grabbed some supplies and she designed a few herself.

This one was more pink, which she likes, and much brighter, which was good. We kept the embossed brown. Overall, decent.

This was a very different style, with a jacket-like wrapping instead of a full card. I quite like it, and think it would be very good, but we decided on another we liked better.

This one had three competing outside designs. A primarily brown with pink ribbon, the same with two maple leafs, and a primarily pink with brown ribbon. They each had their points, but we decided on the first, for it's colour contrast and simplicity.
The inside of the card was ok, but we actually preferred the inside of the first card she designed, so we swapped it in and added some brown pockets for the reply card, map, etc..
This is what we sent off to my mom and Pat for the mass production. There were some minor modifications to get the pink ribbon the shade we wanted, the cardstock heavy enough, the card resized slightly to fit the envelopes. Here is the final result:And there you have it, wedding invitation design start to finish. My fiancee designed a beautiful card (not just my opinion; others have commented), and my mom and Pat did an amazing job recreating it 100 times.