The Pudding Invites

One of the reasons why I picked "Pudding" as my moniker is the fact that pudding is the perfect treat:  it comes in many flavors, it's perfectly sweet, and (as a plus for all of us working hard to loose those last 5 pounds before the wedding) it's usually very low in calories!  In short:  It's the perfect guilty pleasure!

Like pudding, I wanted our invitations to be perfectly sweet without being over the top.  I learned from my adventures with our STDs that although I wanted to design our invites, I did not want to bite off more than I could chew!

I began the journey by attempting to learn the basics of GIMP and Inkscape.  The programs are really easy to use, and there are tons of tutorials online that will help you master them.  For a noobie like me though, it proved to be too much.  It took me nearly two months to finally realize that I was in over my head.  So, I turned to Etsy and found Ginger from studioGdesigns.  She took my idea and ran with it, and the result is more than I would have imagined!

Without further ado, here are the perfectly sweet Pudding invites:

For the life of me, I can't get the edited photo to rotate.  Pengy, maybe you can figure it out?

And a little bit of a close up:

I had the invites printed at Staples on metallic cardstock from paperandmore.  Anyone considering going this route, be warned:   the machines at Staples hate the cardstock.  I had to do some serious grovelling to get the high school student working to keep printing despite the fact that every fourth sheet jammed the printer.  As you can see, the invite is two sided, and the rsvp and reception cards are backed with yellow and navy Cuttlebug embossed cardstock.  I also made the belly bands by using ribbon and a glue gun.

The whole package was placed in a vellum envelope and stuffed into the navy blue outer envelope.  The envelope label is a Martha Stewart template that I edited myself.

All in all, I am super happy with my invitations.  They are one of a kind, completely unique, and didn't cost me my sanity!  I have received nothing but compliments on them, and that always makes the work worth while :)

Did you use a professional to turn your invitation vision into reality?  More importantly, is pudding your guilty pleasure, too?