Invitation Time

Alright, let's get down to business. I'm on a tear right now to try and find our invitations, mainly because we really need to get the Save the Dates out to people and I would like to hopefully have them coordinating with the invites a bit. After a good hint from my co-worker, my Mom and I decided to go to Michael's to see if we could find any print-at-home invites that we liked. Surprisingly I liked a lot of them! I thought for sure I wasn't going to like them and was worried that my printer would be lame and they wouldn't look professional but after perusing the options I think it might work out. After we got home we looked more at michaels.com and then on random sites for inspiration, the following pics have certain elements that I love:

I love the different fonts and also the pic of the map, it has a modern, playful vibe that I'm really into right now. I think I would like to take the written part and put it onto something that had one of our engagement pics because I think those are going to turn out AWESOME! Below is another inspiring Save the Date:

I love the picture at the top and the writing is absolutely GORGEOUS (too bad I checked it out and it costs like $100 to use the font!). I think I wouldn't do the strung-out-date thing because it looks like a lot of work, but the actual card itself is done really really well. Instead of the date on a string I would put a mini March 2011 calendar with our date circled in red, I have seen it done before and think it looks awesome. I tried playing around in photoshop for about 30 minutes and honestly have NO idea how that bride made those herself, she is obviously more technologically inclined than myself.
So after looking at all these other types of invites I found myself back at my recently-crowned "favorite website of all time": etsy.com. I was browsing wedding invites on there and! Low and behold, I found awesome hand-drawn customized invites for not that much more than what we would have bought at Michael's. You can see this particular vendor's shop here and below are some of her specific designs that Jake and I are liking right now:




Love the little bird on the RSVP card on that last one! So this is what we're thinking about right now. I love love love the idea of getting our invites off etsy and also think that these in particular fit with our design aesthetic (don't laugh, we're slowly creating one!).
I think this is it for now. Any feedback/links to other resources is greatly appreciated! I'm spending the next week or so just getting ready for school and working on wedding stuff while Jake is in Colorado so please, feel free to distract me with pretty things to look at! Much love : )