I LOVE our wedding invites!!!!! Grant and I decided that we wanted to do as much DIYing to our wedding as we could. One to save money for our super tight budget. And two - to give everything our special touch :)So the wedding invites definitely were going to be DIY. We did get some help with the supplies though, so its not 100% hardcore DIY. We used the website, www.cardsandpockets.com, who I HIGHLY recommend. We bought 20 sets of the invites. That set included the pocketfold, invitation card stock, invitation mat card stock, 2 precut card stock inserts, RSVP card, RSVP envelope, and mailing envelope. They have a ton of colors to chose from. They offer samples to which is nice. So before you place a big order you can order the samples, either in the actual product or just small cardstock samples to see if the color is what your looking for or size. So after ordering what seemed like 20 samples, we decided on our color selection.
While we waited for our shipment to come in we started working on the invitation. We weren't really sure what we wanted to go with. Palm trees, star fish, etc. We loved how we designed our website, so we went with that same theme. It worked out perfect! The more we hashed out the details the more excited we got. Dont you love how those small details really pull everything together? We than worked on the inserts. First up was the map. I spent a good 4 hours working on that thing in PowerPoint! After slaving on it I realized it was to big, so we had to adjust. That always happens to me though! The wedding details insert was easier, just text mostly. The last thing was the RSVP. We were debating between a mad libs RSVP or not. We thought some people might get confused so we did more along the norm.
We bought the inserts precut. But they sell them uncut and its a little bit cheaper. Being perfectionist we thought it was better to get them precut. ;) We did have to trim the map insert so we could get the staggered look in the pocketfold. But that was a simple cut. Besides that nothing in the invite needed any additional cutting. Dont worry I didnt get off that easy as you will see as you read on. Ha!
The most tedious part was probably the belly band and monogram. I found our ribbon at JoAnns. I wanted something with a design vs the solid color ribbon, and found the perfect retro-like design ribbon. While at JoAnns I also picked up some card stock for the monograms, and monogram mat. Being cohesive, we designed the monogram to match the website. All the text on our website are in billboard like signs, so we made the monogram a sign to. We were able to print out a ton of monograms out on one sheet of card stock, and than I just cut them up with my handy dandy cutterbee trimmer. I was also able to cut the mats for the monogram out of one sheet of card stock, which I used my lovely trimmer again. This is when the perfectionist in me worked against me! I cut probably three times than I needed to so I could find the best 20 to use. LOL When I was finally satisfied I started to put everything together. I used scrapbooking adhesive which was much easier than glue. Soooo happy with the finish product. Check it out (warning my pictures suck! I couldnt get the lighting right) :
We ran into one big snafu. We printed them at home on our inkjet printer. We weren't sure how that would work but it actually printed them quite nicely. But our printer does not print borderless on custom sized paper. So everything was printing out with this weird border. We just readjusted the design and created a brown border on everything. I actually liked it better. It really brings everything together nicely. The pocketfold is a tight fit so we couldnt mat the inserts (which is what my original vision was), so it all worked out in the end.
I went back and forth on the addressing of the envelopes to. I know there's all these etiquette rules, but honestly we arent really paying attention to them. The envelopes we got had this shimmer to them so I wasnt sure how the handwriting would look. So we ended up doing labels. We created the brown border on the labels to give it an extra special touch. The problem with that was our inkjet printer again...the ink easily smeared. I learned that after about 5 labels. So I had to peel the labels off carefully, and stick them on the envelopes holding on to only the sticky part. Than I smoothed them out with a blank sheet of paper. That effort had to be as good as handwriting didnt it? :) That printer rocks, we didnt even have to refill any of the ink!
Get this....the cost per invite came out to $3.11! Not bad at all! Especially since the cheapest invites we priced were $6-$7 each!
After we finished I sort of wished we would of went with a more daring pocketfold color. Like the orange or green. Besides that one small regret, Im soooooo happy with the outcome! And cant wait to work on our next project :)
P.S. Of course we have a mock up invite done in photoshop that I also have to share. This will help you see the invite in better details, since my pictures are so crappy! Once you click on the link, than click on the image and it will enlarge. :)
http://melissaandgrant.com/images/invitation.jpg
