Ahh! I can’t believe it’s only 2½ months until the wedding! To add onto the mounting chaos, B. and I are also thisclose to purchasing a new home!
We finally sent out our last wedding invitation last week, so I thought it would be a good time to share them with you, and some of our lessons learned in trying to get them out!
The Concept
From the get-go, it was important for me to have bilingual English-Chinese invitations. Brian wanted something contemporary, simple and unique, and we both wanted to somehow incorporate our wedding colour (fuchsia) inspiration - what-we-thought-were-cherry-but-may-actually-be-crabapple blossoms. We didn’t want to do RSVP cards, instead opting to have people RSVP on our wedding website.
Original Wedding Colour Inspiration
Finding the Right Invitation
There are several websites online where you can order bilingual wedding invitations, with most of them based in Hong Kong. KamShing/Kamdo is a popular one, as is H2Cards. The cards were inexpensive, but not really to our taste. Also, you have to order at least 100 at a time, so not a good fit if you’re having a smaller wedding. (Remember, even if you are inviting more than 100 guests, you may need only 50 or so invitations if they are all couples.)
Another invitation site based in Hong Kong, 983 Wedding, had invitations that were closer to our taste. We also found one we liked on Etsy, but it was more than we wanted to spend.
Finally, B. remembered that his cousin Shannon was a graphic designer, with experience designing wedding invitations in the past, so we decided to give it a go!
How to Partially Design Your Own Invitation
We created a Pinterest board with some design ideas that caught our eye - I mostly pinned some colours and invitations that I liked, while B. drew more from design concepts he liked - clean Japanese design and some lasercut patterns.
The Chinese text was probably the hardest part, without an expert on hand. I really had to rely on the wording guides from H2Cards and 983 Wedding. (Latter in Chinese) My mom helped, of course, but I had to correct some of her suggestions based on what was written online!
In the end, B. and I were super-thrilled with our invitations and their unique design!
How Many Invitations?
We went through our guest list and counted out how many couples/families we were planning to invite, then added 20 and rounded up to the nearest 10 just in case. We invited about 175 people, which worked out to about 75-80 individual invitations, so we printed 100.
Delivering the Invitations
My initial plan was to hand-deliver most of the invitations to save money on postage. This was effective for when I was visiting relatives last month in Hong Kong, but mostly ineffective when it came to tracking down my friends. To make matters worse, we had set the RSVP deadline probably earlier than necessary, so I felt rushed to get the invitations out as soon as I returned from Asia, and we prematurely printed a lot of envelopes with no addresses. In the end, I had to go around and track down a lot of addresses and get a lot of envelopes reprinted, and we sent the last of the invitations on the RSVP deadline - May 1.
Lesson learned: No matter how close you are to your friends or how often you think you see them, get their mailing address as it will save you time with invitations, and with thank-you cards later on!
Vincci Tsui is a food writer/lover/eater by day, and a raging bridezilla by night. She is marrying B. on July 25, 2015.
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