*DisneyBride* said:
Just wondering if anyone made their own invitations for the wedding? Would you like to share?
DisneyBride, last year I made the invitations for my Fairy Tale Weddings vow renewal. I took what most might consider a bit of an unconventional route.
You see, for years I have been creating custom greeting cards thanks to the Internet. One of the on-line companies that I've been using is
www.shutterfly.com. I've been a customer of theirs for years and have always been pleased with their work. When it came time to send out invitations for my vow renewal, using Shutterfly was a logical choice for me. I wrote about this in my
My Fairy Tale Weddings Vow Renewal Trip Planning Session trip report here on the Dis website. I will post below what I put in my trip report:
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I decided to keep the momentum of my vow renewal planning going. I thought it was about time that I created an invitation to send to my family members.
Since you folks know that I am a high-tech geek, an ordinary run-of-the-mill invitation wouldn't do for me. No, sir-ee. I needed a personal one that came from my heart and not from someone else's. Anytime I need something like that, I go to my favorite website and create my own greeting card. I've been doing it for years.
In the old days, I used to purchase a standard greeting card in a store, place a photograph inside of it, and US Mail it to my recipient. But with the advent of the Digital Age, I could literally kill three birds with one stone from the privacy of my own home. I could (1) upload a personal photograph to use as my card's cover, (2) create a simple greeting and add a more in-depth personal message to it, and (3) US Mail the card without ever leaving home. My favorite on-line company for creating personal greeting cards is
Shutterfly.com, and so I decided to create my vow renewal invitation on their website.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the greeting card creation process, I will give you a little glimpse of it. Creating a personal greeting card is really quite easy to do, not to mention personally satisfying and just plain fun (well, at least for a creative geek it is).
I pulled out my old wedding album and asked my son to scan in a picture for me. Being the high-tech geek that he is (the acorn, as they say, does not fall far from this tree), he obliged. Once my wedding photo
(click here to view it) had been scanned in and added to my computer's hard-drive, it took only moments to upload it to my account on Shutterfly.
On the Shutterfly website, I began having some fun. I chose a simple border to place around my wedding photo and used that for the cover of the card. I then began composing a greeting for the card's interior. It didn't take long before I had come up with the following:
Remember when we were a
couple of fresh-faced kids?
Well, come and see what we
look like after 20 years of marriage.
You are cordially invited to our
vow renewal ceremony at
Walt Disney World. We hope you'll
join us as we begin our next 20 years.
Love,
Janet & Rick
(an official Fairy Tale couple)
Once my simple greeting was out of the way, it was time to add a personal note to my card. I composed the following one:
Rick and I will be celebrating twenty years of
marriage with an intimate vow renewal ceremony
inside Disney's Wedding Pavilion in Florida. Our
ceremony will be held at 2 PM on October 27th.
We are hoping you can join us as we take a stroll
down memory lane. We promise lots of laughter
and even a few thrills that week.
We have booked hotel rooms in everyone's name
at the BoardWalk Villas. These hotel rooms are free
via our Disney Vacation Club membership, and we
would love it if you would stay in one of them. The
BoardWalk Villas is such a fun resort in such a
great location.
As to our celebration dinner, we're planning
something unique. We can't promise yet that we'll
be able to do it, but Disney is working on it for us.
Keep your fingers crossed.
Please let us know if you can attend our vow
renewal ceremony this Fall. It should be a wild time!
Janet & Rick
With my greeting card completed, I selected its recipients (my family members) and placed my order. My job was done.
It's really quite amazing when you consider that I did everything while sitting at the computer in my bedroom. I didn't have to travel to a greeting card store in order to select and purchase a card. I didn't have to travel to a photo store in order to get a copy of a photograph. I didn't have to travel to the US Post Office in order to purchase a stamp and mail my card. I didn't have to travel any further than where my fingers could take me on my computer's keyboard. Ain't technology grand? What a great time to be alive.
I don't have a copy of my card that I can share. However, I do have a few screen captures that I took while creating it. For those of you who would like to see what my completed card looked like, the following links should give you a pretty good idea:
Invitation Cover
Invitation Inside
Invitation Greeting
Invitation Personal Message
With my card complete, all I had to do was sit back and wait to see who from my family would officially accept the invitation to attend Rick and my vow renewal.
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