Envelope Sneak Peek

I know that I said that I wasn't going to show off the invites yet...so to hold you off before I can show them off, here are some pictures of the envelopes being printed and drying. I did receive the replacement envelopes in the right size before the weekend started, so I knew that I wanted to try to print them all out this past weekend.

Here they are all laid out while I printed out the return address on the backs of the envelopes:And yeah, they didn't just cover the couch seats, they spread across the top of the couch too:Actually, they also took up a large portion of the bannister that runs along the upstairs hallway, which I didn't get a picture of. Here's a close-up as they dry:

They're SO beautiful, if I do say so myself! You can't really see the sheen that the paper has, which just makes it SO elegant, in my opinion. In fact, it's so shiny and opalescent that if I use my flash with my camera, the picture doesn't even turn out due to the reflection.

I have to admit that with all the other problems that I had with printing on the cover weight Stardream paper, I was a little apprehensive about printing on Stardream envelopes. Lucky for me, the envelopes were as easy to work with as the text weight paper was. After some small layout and spacing adjustments were made, these ran through my printer at home with no problem at all.

I printed the return addresses on Saturday and let them dry all day long. Then on Sunday afternoon, I made a mail merge with my wedding address database file and printed out most of the actual invitations. (Yes, we still have a few stragglers who we haven't gotten an address for, or they've moved and I haven't thought to get their new address.) So I'll still have about 5-10 envelopes to print out later this week at some point.

I'm getting REALLY close to my own self-imposed deadline on getting these babies in the mail. My own deadline set was September 1st...which is just a two days away as I write this. Luckily for me, I plan on taking one invitation with me to work tomorrow and weighing it on our postage meter. That way, I know exactly how much postage they are going to need. I think that I know...but I want to be certain. Then, once I know the amount of postage needed, I'll head off to the post office and buy the stamps. If I manage to do all of that tomorrow, then I'll just need to put the stamps onto the outer envelopes and drop them in the mail the day after.

I might actually meet my deadline on 95% of them. Thankfully the few that I know need that need adjustments all live either in Austin or at least within the state of Texas, and one or two additional days before I mail them won't make that much of a difference.

Are you DIY-ing your invitations? How is it going? Or how did it go, if you've already finished? I'd LOVE to hear about your own experience.