Wedding Blog

It all started with this 12×12 scrapbook paper. Actually this piece of paper was my inspiration for the entire wedding. My main wedding colors are lavender, green, brown & rustic white. The pale pink & blues are just accents.

I love these stamps and knew it would fit right into our garden wedding.

These flourish stamps really make the invites pop.

The process included stamping, printing, cutting, gluing & scoring.

I was able to fit everything onto one piece of 8.5 x 11 cardstock!

Cut and glue.

The front of the invite. (Direction card is in the background, courtesy of our venue)

Top of the inside. My favorite quote.

Bottom of invite.

Unfortunately, I was not able to finish all the invitations in one batch (even though I only needed 60). When I finally went to finish them I had quite a few obstacles to overcome. My paper trimmer stopped working! The blade wasn’t sharp enough so we had to make a trip to Staples to get a new one. Mr. Violet found a blade that can perforate (great for postcards) & a blade that can score. It’s really easy to attach to your trimmer. Where was this when I slaved over the scoring with my straight edge & bone folder? Oh well.

I also ran out of stamps so I had to make a trip to the post office! Oh and one more silly thing. Mr. Violet upgraded our Microsoft to Vista and for some unknown reason all of the fonts used for my wedding disappeared, so I spent another 30 minutes finding the fonts and learning how to download it correctly.

And last but not least.. when I went to make more postcard RSVPs, I couldn’t get the words to align correctly. This is what it should look like. See how everything is centered in the middle?

This was the second batch I made this weekend. The alignment was too far left. Due to lack of energy and guilt of all the paper I’d already wasted, I tried to make it work. It isn’t perfect but this will have to do.

The cost: I didn’t save all my receipts (shame on me) but it was approximately $1.50 per invite (about 60 in total). I didn’t include the stamps, trimmer or miscellaneous supplies because I already had these items, but if I did count them, it would probably be an additional $100 (rubber stamps, calligraphy pen & ink, trimmer, etc..) I also bought a ton of the scrapbook paper at Michaels when it was on sale for 4 for $1 (retails from $.75-$.1.20/sheet depending on where you get it). I literally grabbed whatever was left.

Making invitations was much harder than I anticipated. The hardest part was addressing the envelopes with calligraphy. I don’t know why I thought it would be easy to do, but it was very similar to the Save the Date envelopes I did.

Overall, I’m happy with the result. I think these invites really scream me us! If you plan on doing your own invites, be aware that it’s very time consuming and you should really think out each step first before attempting to do anything. Think assembly line! You should also try to buy all the materials at once and not do what I did. (I must have gone back to Paper Presentation 5 times just to get more paper!) It also is to your benefit to do all the invites at once, or not only do lose your momentum, something always happens to go wrong the second time around. I’m a great example of this. I’m glad it’s over, and I really hope our guests appreciate this labor of love.

On to the next project.. coming soon.