Cordially Invited Part 1

My brain is like wedding soup. Ideas tend to float around quicker than I can pick them up and shovel them into my mouth. But here and there I manage to pick out one of the larger pieces. We can start with one of the more well-formed potato chunks.

The invitation.

Sak and I were milling around San Francisco again this morning, on our quest for $350 dollars worth of black canvas. We'll be ready for that giant carrot later on, though. Across the ways we eyed a dangerous word: paper.

Kelly Paper Store, to be exact. Now, we had seen the mecca that is Paper Source earlier, and filtered through the paltry offerings at the local Office Depot's and Max's, but this - this was what we were looking for all along. A warehouse.

We eagerly threw in a few bucks to feed the outrageous SF parking meter (only to find the free lot across the street...), and walked into the store. The clerk greeted us, and asked if we needed help.

"THIS IS OUR FIRST TIME HERE." I boldy stated. He smiled, and motioned that we should take a look around. Paper everywhere! We went through each aisle, and under each ream of paper was an open stack of samples. You could buy the ream, or just a few sheets, your choice. They even had an invitation center where you could custom order pre-made sets, or cuts of your own choosing.

I drooled around the store greedily, and Sak followed, happily eyeing the reasonable prices.

We came out with a 250-sheet ream of 80 lb., 8.5x11"-sized black linen cardstock.

On the way out the door, I noted to Sak, "We will be back."

"For all our paper needs." He agreed, sounding much like a commercial.

Of course, we then went home to experiment.

Here's the "schematic":


And here's our mockup:
(Names have been smudged out to hide the anonymous.) Now, I'll get into the details in another post, but I'm proud to present the papery breakdown (not including inserts):

1 1/3 sheets of black linen = 21 cents
1/2 sheet of white linen = 10 cents
1"x11" strip of leftover washi paper = ~10 cents

So far our invite comes to a total of 41 cents! Yay! I wonder how much more envelopes, stamps and inserts will cost?