Be Our Guest

I'm pretty sure all our Countdown Party invites are out by now, so time to show them off! :)

I knew from the get-go that I wanted a soft, whimsical looking invite. I wanted balloons like in Up and nothing too overtly Disney. I was digging pastels and ended up using purple and yellow just because I like those colors so much.  I added a light blue so it didn't took too much like wedding-color overload.  And finally, we decided on the phrase, "Be our guest" to clue people in on what we were planning:

Attempt 1 [personal photo]

My first try was with the big round balloons, which I liked, but I really didn't like the weird spacing for the information at the bottom.  M said my balloons looked like lollipops, which is understandable, and although I liked the presence/presents pun, it felt weird to write it in.  To be honest, including anything about presents (even not wanting them) seemed grabby to me.

I made a few changes, came up with a different layout, and added in the free Waltograph font I ended up using on the envelopes:

Final version [personal photo]

On the back, I created a map of our neighborhood since parking is a little weird:

[personal photo]

It wasn't until after everything was printed that I noticed a number of mistakes.  Did you see the big, glaring error?  Here's a hint, it's correct on my first version and terribly, terribly wrong on the final version.  ....That's right, we're hosting a party in the past.  2010 to be precise.  Whoops.  If I had thought through it more I would have changed the wording to "Saturday, May 28" so there would be no confusion, but oh well.  Hopefully everyone will get what we mean. 

The other errors were less important, but still annoying: 
1) I'd really meant to have round balloons like the first draft, but somewhere along the line they got stretched into oval.  Not a big deal, but I wish I'd noticed earlier so I could have fixed it. 
2)  The map on the back is really hard to read where parking/our house is.  If I'd thought it through more, I would have made it bigger.  Luckily most of our guests have been to our house and dealt with the unusual parking situation before.

I'd run the draft by M and my mom, but none of us found these errors until it was too late.  Another lesson learned for invites: show a draft to an uninterested party and triple, quadruple, quintuple check it!

Our final, printed invite [personal photo]