Wedding Appointments!

I made appointments last week to meet with an invitation printer, T&N Printing, a local place here in Charlottesville, as well as MS Event Rentals.  My mom and sister came along with me to meet with them and I am SO thankful they did! The first meeting was to get pricing and information on invitations. I have created my own invitation suite (invitation, RSVP, program/menu) on Pages (I have a Macbook Pro).  Back in September I planned a baby shower for my best friend. I had her party package printed at FedEx/Kinkos and they did a good job, but it was quite a hassle and very expensive. I have purchased her package from Etsy and thought I could do a pretty good job making my own suite for my wedding. I also couldn't find exactly what I wanted from the online retailers such as Wedding Paper Divas, Invitations by Dawn, etc. 

I had expected that the price would be pretty high, although I knew from some recommendations, that the quality would be great. I was thrilled with Nikki quoted me an insanely reasonable price to print the invitations. The paper quality was great and they wouldn't have to charge me a set up fee based on my design and quantity.  I can't say enough about how nice they were and how helpful both Nikki and the owner of the company were to us. 

Our next stop was to MS Events.  We got there a little early and I am glad we did because what I was expecting to be a short, 30 min meeting ended up taking 2 hours!!!!!!  It was so exhausting and overwhelming! I wish I had known going into it that the appt would last that long. I would have been more prepared with ideas and snacks!! :)

I had intended to just look at chairs and silverware and glassware to get an idea of pricing and options that might work for our budget.  Instead it went through the whole shebang of rentals for everything. Linda was very nice and did have some good suggestions on decorations and logistics.  There are so many options for where to put the bread and butter plates, where to put butter (pats of butter on the plates? small scoops of butter in ramekins? Butter on the buffet line?), and on and on.  My amazing mom and sister were so great to sit through that with me as well, they certainly didn't know that it was going to be that overwhelming.

A friend of mine gave me tickets to the UVA vs Notre Dame basketball game and I was able to take my sister which was a welcome relief after such a stressful meeting. I had planned a whole thing of going to lunch with my mom and sister after going to MS Events but since it took so long I didn't have time before getting to the game.  UVA came off with a win too!