always the invites

For some reason, it's the paper goods that tempt me the most. Look at how pretty these menus are from Sunday Suppers! The gray cardstock with white calligraphed letters...How is it possible that in this day and age computer printers have yet to utilize white ink. My printer and wallet cannot handle printing gray ink with white ink over hundreds of sheets of cardstock. And I don't have the patience for calligraphy (or budget to allocate to it). After briefly attempting to come up with a plan involving getting the whole invite turned into a custom rubber stamp and finding white ink/embossing powder (bahhhh wedding brain is truly a disease)...I have decided to go the less-stressful route. Gray envelopes that I will be hand-addressing in white while the invites themselves will be on white/ivory with words printed in gray. Unless I get really time-crunched (aka lazy) and go with printed labels. It's 2010, I can only follow so much etiquette before throwing in the towel.

At the moment, my preliminary budget estimate puts us at $150 for approximately 100 invites and that includes: invite, outer envelope, insert for map, reply card and reply card envelope and printer ink. Savings FTW? It pleases the analytical logical part of me that can't reconcile the fact that other than myself, mom and grandma, these will all be thrown away (or optimistically, recycled).