Invitation

Most people expected that I would make my own wedding invitation, since paper craft has become my hobbies about a year ago.  But I wasn't super keen on that, to be honest most of the time my handmade card cost $3 or more, so handmade invitation in my opinion is definitely not the best way to save money.  However, the critical part is not really about saving money, it's I can't really deal with not cutting the paper straight :P.  As much as I love all our friends and family, I still have to be realistic on how much time I can spend on this, after all I still have a job.  (I know,  I know, most of you understand that I surf on the net a lot at work, but I still gotta pretend I am working though :P)

To save time and money and still have a little bit of personal touch, we decided to buy a invitation kit from Michaels.  We bought one with plum theme colour to match our wedding theme.  The kit comes with invitation cards, RSVP cards, envelopes for both, and little ribbons to be assembled on the invitation cards.  So no more worrying about not cutting straight :) yay!!!

As we were browsing through all the wedding invitations to get an idea of what to write, one of them really caught our attention (it's the one that's out sourced to India,).  Bear really likes the invitation being bilingual and I really like the little map that came with the invitation.  So we decided to print a Chinese version of the invitation on the reverse side of the card. 

Since the back side of the card has no decoration, I thought of adding a little bit of gold colour to match the accent colour of the wedding theme.  My friend Cathy also scanned her collection of wedding invitations to give me some idea on how to write a proper Chinese invitation.  I think nothing is more classic than the double happiness Chinese character.  So I bought a double happiness stamp on Ebay.  I used the embossing tool and decorated the invitation card a bit, see first picture.

As for the map, Bear spent a lot of time drawing it.  He did an amazing job!!  We decided to print it on the "travel" theme scrapbook paper to match our destination wedding theme, plus map and traveling they seem to be related :).   The travel theme is on the other side of map, so you can't see it from the picture.

These are our prototypes, hopefully the real thing will look better.  And it should be a little different then these.  So there is still a little surprise remained :)