Luckily, we found one readymade invitation that suited our purposes. It was from the Precious Collection catalog (gag, what a terrible name!) and was the Lustrous Silver style. It was a formal, non-folding invitation in crisp white cardstock, and it had a pretty silver and black filigree border. Our absolute ideal invitations would have been a lot like this, but with a wider and more elaborate border, and with probably a different font. But these were close enough and at a very reasonable cost.

The text was in a raised black script, and we used a slightly contemporary wording of "Together with their families" instead of listing the bride's parents. We felt this was more inclusive and not so stuffy. Yeah, we wanted a formal wedding, but not a stuffy wedding ;-).

Here's a close-up of the invitation border (which doesn't show up well in most scans).

Full scans of our invitation and response card are also here.

These are some clever response cards we received.

Found some nice white cards with "Thank You" in silver foil fancy script (which does not show up in scans) from the American Wedding Album catalog. Much more inexpensive than the ones that matched our invitations, yet still elegant and coordinating. Trystan's never been a huge fan of 'matching' anyways -- coordinating is where it's at. This catalog also has the lowest price for those silly and much-beloved plume pens!