{recap} wedding invite workshop

well... to start off the wedding recaps, i think i should begin with our invites - since they did inspire a great deal of the details that stood out on our wedding day.

after designing and printing the invites - which were partially printed by a family friend, then the sandollar details were gocco'd by me - we had a family assembly party consisting of my parents, my brother and sis-in-law, myself and my hubby (then fiance). each person more of less to charge of a "station" ...

here's what we had to tackle that day:

-emboss address on all envelope flaps

-crease and close belly bands

-xyron paisley pocket liners & all invitation pieces

-adhesive main paisley liner and flap liner

-gocco all sandollar details

-adhesive invites into pocket folders

-insert all the detail cards into pockets

-apply postage stamps to rsvp postcards

... that was pretty much it! sounds easy right? well take a look at the process and you decide, but in my opinion this was a labor of love that took upwards of 10 hours to complete!

here are my bro and sis-in-law: he's embossing our envelope flaps 

and here lisa is using the sample belly band that's taped to the mat to line up the crease marks for each band

even my now hubs got involved - J worked the xyron machine to make the pocket folder lining into stickers, making them easier/quicker to stick the lining on. and that's me standing gocco'ing the sandollars!

mom and J watching me work the kinks outta lining the pocket folders

in the pic below - my nephew showing off something and if you look at my gocco screen you can see the various sizes of sandollars awaiting their turn to be gocco'd

mr. b .... in the zone - our family is full of perfectionist, especially him, so those embossed envelopes were perfectly squared thanks to the mat, some blue tape, and repeat - repeat - repeat

here you can see the grid my bro set up to use to emboss all the envelopes and in the next pic my mom testing it out

two perfectionist - my dad and bro - go figure, racing to see how many they could line in 10 minutes! boys operate so differently from women

taking a break to play a lil' wii bowling...

no longer is it light outside and the girls of course are still working on affixing the lining and the actual invite pieces to the pocketfolders 

later that night i continued lining pocket folders and backing the invites to the liner...

first i put in the part that sits behind the invite, then the flap had to be attached

i made sure to run my bone folder over all the liner to smooth it down and make sure there were no ripples

last up was to stick on each invitation piece which had previously been xxyron'd to create a stick backing so i could easily stick them all in to their own pocket folders.

next up i'll show you the final results of all the pieces assembled and ready to be sent out to our guests!

it's so hard to believe we were making these almost a year ago in May! wow!