Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Hidden messages

Sometimes, I get surprised by how little people know about weddings who aren't actually planning one. I was shocked to learn that some people don't realize that you should generally avoid wearing a long white gown to a wedding if you're not the bride, that not everyone understands that you probably shouldn't bring an uninvited date without permission, or that some people don't know how to fill out a response card that comes with a wedding invitation!

I suppose some response cards are less than 100% self-explanatory, and our RSVP postcards are not really any exception: they are laid out like this.


We hope that by asking people to initial their entreé selections, we'll know how many in a family are attending, but in hindsight we probably should have replaced the "__ ACCEPTS" with "__ of __ ACCEPTS" so that they'd know to indicate a number (and also what the maximum number ought to be!). But we just couldn't figure out a way to make it painfully clear that the "M_________" line needs to be filled in with a name! I thought everyone knew this, but as we've shown some of our friends the invitation suites, they had no idea... so I'm glad I checked!

To combat the possibility of having to sort through 115 sets of names to determine by process of elimination who a particular RSVP card may have come from, I did what many brides wisely do: I put numbers on each of them, corresponding to their position on a spreadsheet I've been managing since we started making our guest list. There are lots of ways to hide these numbers—one of the coolest I've seen was Mrs. Green Tea's MOH's black light pen method—but I already knew I wanted to add more visual interest to the back of the postcards so I decided to design a monogram where I could tuck the number in a non-obtrusive kind of way. Here is the monogram I came up with...


And here's what it looks like "in action"!


It was a simple little add (even though I had to actually manually change the number 115 times and hand-feed each postcard through the photo printer!) but I am super glad I did this: unlike the envelope liners, I have no post-DIY regrets and I really love the way they came out.

How did you track your RSVPs?

2 comments:

  1. It's so true. So many people are clueless about wedding rules that it makes you question whether the rules really exist at all.

    Thanks for all your supportive comments!

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  2. Genius!!

    Thanks for the comment about the rings - I'm checking out the Nexus Diamonds now ... I never knew they were possible! For a while I dreamed of a ring made from the platinum found in catalytic converters ... well, they're incredibly hard to find and for me to find enough catalytic converters to make a ring is just a silly undertaking!

    You're right - nobody in the "real" world know that I had the same ring as Lauren ... but it's still a hard thing to swallow! I'm thinking of showing it to him anyway!

    ReplyDelete

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