Invitations

My fiance and I didn't want to send out Save the Dates, because we had so many guests coming from out of town that we wanted to make sure they had ALL the information they needed as far in advance as possible.  So with that in mind, we decided to order the invitations in January and we started sending them out in February. 
And instead of putting a ton of details into the invitations like wedding registry lists, we put a business card-size insert in that matched the invites directing them to our free wedding website that we created through www.weddingchannel.com.  We were able to link our wedding registries and create complete pages about our wedding on there, including lodging info, attire details, pictures, our story, and even stories about our wedding party!  And creating the website is completely FREE!
We decided to go through www.vistaprint.com for our wedding invitations.  We ordered 250 invitations with plain white envelopes and 250 RSVP cards with plain white envelopes - the entire order for everything came to $188.23.  Now, I know what some of you are thinking - 250?!?!  Is she crazy?!?!  Well, I know I over-ordered (our guest list is around 200 with all the relatives and their kids, so we really only needed about 150 invites), but I kept this in mind:  for some reason, the town we live in has HORRIBLE USPS service.  It can take anywhere from 2 days to a week for a piece of mail to get to PORTLAND - which is only a 5 hour drive from here.  We discovered this around Christmas time, when the gifts we sent out AND the gifts arriving from our family were all late getting here and there.  We sent something UPS Ground to the Midwest, and it made it there faster than our priority mail package to the same area mailed around the same time.
Long story short, I had a feeling that mail was going to go missing, and it did - we have had to resend approximately 25% of our invitations.  This is extremely frustrating, but at least I know we will never be short of replacements!  And the difference in cost between 150 and 250 invitations was only about $30.
A bit of advice with using www.vistaprint.com - sign up for their mailing list, and sign up for the free bridal kit.  By doing so, you will start getting emails and postcards in the mail with discount codes for anywhere from 10-30% off your entire order - can't beat that!
I've attached the censored version of our invitation and the RSVP below - I love the green!  And I love the personalized tree with the first initial of my and my fiance's names!

Next time:  the dress!