Sunday confessional: My DIY invitations failed. Completely and utterly failed. I spent months designing a suite that I loved (featuring the prettiest little birds on each insert), bought paper, talked to printers… then bam! Out of nowhere, we find out that nobody could print on the paper we bought (oh, about $100 worth). And the PDF of the invites was incompatible. And there was a border on them that nobody could print. It was too late to change it because my laptop crashed and the entire template was on there. And so on…It kept going like this until I eventually wanted to poke my own eyes out.
I was so stressed with midterms coming up, and being so close to crunch time for invites (we’re at about 6 weeks now)…I just couldn’t handle it. So what did we do?
We called up Wedding Paper Divas, put in an order, and 5 days later, these pretties were in my hands.
I still wanted the invites to have a homemade feel to them and some personalized elements. We bought typewriter letter stamps from Michael’s and stamped each RSVP envelope with “oh happy day” (our wedding catchphrase!). The invitation suite by WPD also didn’t include the lovely green inserts you see above and below. We did those ourselves, and then embossed them all by hand. Dr. Dave had fun with the embosser! And I loved the way the birds turned out, a coppery gold and nicely texturized.
We then assembly-lined the invitations and tied them with green raffia ribbon. This is what the finished product looked like:
Finally, I hand addressed all of the envelopes using a calligraphy pen and a guide I found online. It was surprisingly easy, and after a bit of practice, I really hit my calligraphy stride! If you can’t afford a calligrapher, I would definitely recommend trying it yourself rather than printing out labels. It just looks much more personalized and even a bit quirky!
So, invitations are finally out! It really feels SO good to have that done; and even though I would have rather had them be designed by me and one-of-a-kind, this was a great alternative that really took the pressure off. I suppose that sometimes with DIY, we have to be flexible–things just come up that keep certain projects from working. And that’s ok too.
Did you make your own invitations, darlings? How did they turn out? I’ve seen some beautiful designs around the blogs lately…
-B