Invitation Design, AKA my mother never answers her email or calls me back

This summer, after James and I got engaged and started thinking about wedding plans, I found what I thought would be the perfect invitation design. I just fell in love with them. They featured peonies which are my favorite flower and the bloom I wanted featured in my bouquet. The design was slightly more modern but the invitations still had a refined elegance to them, they were letterpress and very classy. And they were also about $1000 for 100 invitations, not including reply cards, escort cards, thank you cards and all the rest.

Yikes.

We knew that was ridiculous, so I searched for other invitations that were similar, but not letterpress (which is really really expensive!) - I couldn't find anything. Nothing fit. I just fell in love with that simple, beautiful outline of a peony and nothing else would do. Then somehow I found the one guy on the internet who sold rubber stampers that had a peony image very similar to the one in the invitations. Sweet!

So I ordered them in three different sizes, James and I bought linen cardstock and envelopes, we worked out a layout for the image and the words on the page. We were set. I took a picture of our mock-up invitation and sent it to my mother and asked her to get back to me with her thoughts. I was particularly interested in what she had to say about the wording, since I pulled that from examples on theknot.com. The wording was:

With joyful hearts
Henry and Judy Ryder
Invite you to share and celebrate
At the marriage of their daughter
Suzanne Marie Ryder
to
James Patrick Webster
Saturday, the 20th of June 2009
At six o'clock in the evening
Auletto's Caterers
Almonesson NJ

The majority of the text was in a modern, Arial-type font, and our names were in a fancy script in pink.I wasn't sure if the wording was formal enough, but the knot seemed to indicate that anything more formal is for a black tie wedding or a wedding held in a church. So I sent the picture of the invitation to my mother.

And waited.

And waited.

Finally, after about a week of absolutely bubkiss from her, I called to talk to her about it. She was immediately upset that I hadn't called earlier (she has a phone! she has email! I specifially asked her to get back to me when she had a chance!) to talk about it, and she expressed major disappointment in the invitations. She basically attacked me about the wording (it was inappropriately informal, to her) the font, etc etc etc. And what really irritated me was that she had been sitting on this resentment for about a week and said nothing to me about it. So I told her to write up what she wanted the invitation to say, email it to me, and I'd fix it. She agreed.

So I waited.

And waited.

Finally I called her this weekend, and she told me she hadn't gotten to it yet. I told her, I need to have this finalized, because we really need to start working on making the invitations. It's going to be a long, tedious process, and I want to have as much time as possible. She said she understood. So I told her I'd look up invitation wording in the etiquette book that had been my sister's, write up an example, and send it to her for her approval. She said that would work, so that's what I did.The new wording is as follows:

With joyful hearts
Mr. and Mrs. Henry Dean Ryder
Request the pleasure of your company
At the marriage of their daughter
Suzanne Marie Ryder
to
James Patrick Webster
Saturday the twentieth of June
Two thousand and nine
At six o'clock in the evening
Almonesson, New Jersey

The main font was a fancier script than the Arial-type that I used on the first one, and I kept the fancy pink script for our names the same. And I kept the "with joyful hearts" part because it makes me happy and my mom didn't specifically object to it.So I took a picture of the new invitation, sent it to my mom and told her to get back to me with her thoughts.

And now, I'm waiting....