Paper angst

England is a pretty amazing country in which to live, but it definitely is a barren wasteland in terms of stationery-related products! Both Lee and I want to DIY our invitations - hopefully we can save a bit of cash and inject a bit of our own style into the process. We tried our hand at some homemade Christmas cards and save-the-dates this year using supplies from Paper Source (more on that later) and were quite happy with the final result.

We've found some paper over here but it's so much more expensive! And don't get me started on envelopes...I've only been able to find squares ones, massive 6.4x9 ones, and smaller 4.5x6.4 ones. There is nothing close to 5x7 size that we both like the best. How I long for a Paper Source or a decent Michaels over here...Maybe a city like London has speciality stores but I'm out in the burbs.

As the pound is still strong, we're strongly leaning towards ordering from Paper Source again. But this time we will definitely have them shipped to our friends in Seattle (who have kindly agreed to ship the paper/envelopes to my parents in Canada and thus saving us the crazy UPS duty charges).

The other thing I'm worried about with invitations is that there is a different style of doing things over here...Last year we received 2 invitations to friends' weddings where they had hand written our names on the invitation. I thought that was really strange looking but have later found that this is considered proper etiquette.

"The names of the guests should be handwritten in full in the top left-hand corner of the invitation"

{from Brides Magazine UK}

I don't like the look really, and can't afford to hire a calligrapher, so I hope all of our British guests won't be offended. Yikes!