Invitiations- just a piece of paper?

When this whole wedding business stopped being a discussion between Calvin and I and started becoming reality, Calvin's mom, Mrs. O'Keefe, started suggesting invitation ideas.

This was two weeks after we got engaged. Two weeks! How was I, how were we, supposed to know what type of invitations we wanted? We didn't even know anything else about the wedding at that point in time!

But Mrs. O'Keefe started the wheels turning in my head. Invitations. Huh. We should start thinking about those. At this point, we didn't even have a date. Nonetheless, when we were out shopping at the mall, I brought Calvin in to Papyrus. There was a display board of different types of invitations, one of which were these.

Absolutely beautiful. And awesome. Little did I know that they were engraved invitations from Crane's, which meant that not only were they amazing, they were also freaking expensive. Like sell our first child to pay for them expensive. And wedding invitations are not a priority for us. I love amazing paper as much as the next person, but for us, there are other places that are a bigger priority. Like food, booze and a band.

So then I turned to the next place- Hollander's. Like Paper Source, only better, in many ways. It is independently owned. They make many of their own papers in the basement of the store. Besides, Calvin used to live around the corner from them.

Most importantly of all, they do letterpress printing! And their prices are extremely reasonable- $175 for the custom plate and printing, or $115 if you print them yourself. The paper they recommend you use is Arturo Stationary. The total for 100 invitations, envelopes, response cards and envelopes would end up being roughly $500- they give you a discount (not on their website) if you are printing with more than one plate. And it would be more like $350 if you are local, and are willing to print them yourself.

Which Calvin and I are more than capable of doing.

Unfortunately, not only was the price of the invitations a bit out of our budget, it turns out that letterpress does not work well if you want to have light text on a dark card. The next option, thermography, has the same problems with light and dark. While silver or gold ink would work, there is a part of me that finds it really cheesy. And textured text (either raised or pressed) was really important to me, for some reason. What to do? What to do?

Like anything else, this meant going back to the drawing board, and looking over previously examined places.