The Night Before

Although I was very, very tempted to make our rehearsal dinner invitations as complicated as humanly possible (an unfortunate personality trait of mine), a wise friend strongly advised me to keep them simple — our guests would never know that I had originally planned on doing a layered invitation with the top layer having rounded corners, and I shouldn't create more work for myself! Although I'm sure I would have loved the complicated result as well, the less complicated route saved me a lot of time (and sanity) and I was still happy with them.

Our bridal party and close family members received this invitation for the festivities that will be occurring the night before our wedding:


Everything was printed on Stardream Quartz, and I used matching Quartz A7 envelopes. I did not print anything on the envelopes as FMIL Cupcake took care of all the addressing!


Along with the invitation, I included an insert with driving directions and an insert that describes the history of The Ship Inn, where our dinner will be. The history is on the restaurant's website and I thought it would be a nice touch, since it is an historic building. Now the guests will have a little insight into the location before they get there.

I wanted the design to complement the color palette for our wedding, but I also wanted these invites to be fun and a little different from everything else our guests have received for our wedding. The wallpaper image that I used for the background was from good ol' iStock (it was a seamless pattern vector file, and I changed the colors). I like that the damask wallpaper pattern complements the old-fashioned ambiance of the Ship Inn while the bright colors give it some modern flair. The font I used for all pieces is Century Gothic, which is one of my favorite sans serif fonts.

All of the rectangle shapes with rounded corners (which frame all of the copy) are what I had originally intended to make top layers, which would have meant twice the printing, twice the cutting and the additional hassle of corner rounding (no matter how much I love the high-tech corner rounder in my workplace!). Printing everything as one layer did not alter my design at all and it made things lighter for mailing purposes, as well. Hooray for simplifying!

How involved are you getting with your rehearsal dinner invitations? Have you decided to simplify any of your big projects for the sake of your sanity?