Weddingbee Blog

Oh my lord. HALLELUJAH. I was SO glad when our invitations were done! When I finally put them in the mail, I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

I read about people making their own invitations but I can now tell you with absolute certainty that even if you read about other people’s whingeing, whining, and heartache surrounding their DIY wedding invitation project, you do not really know the pain until you do it yourself.

I’m hoping it’s like childbirth and the memory of the pain will erase itself once the reality of our beautiful newborn—er, wedding invites—sets in. (Still waiting for that to happen. It still feels too surreal.)

Here are some photos from the rest of the process and things that I wished I had known:

I was lucky enough to have the help of a great graphic designer that I work with. He kindly donated his time (”I’m a hopeless romantic… emphasis on the hopeless,” he says. Awwww!) and kept his comments about my annoying perfectionist tendencies to himself, which is amazing. Even I know I can get annoying.

Tip #1: To expedite the design process when working with a designer, do your homework.

Thank goodness we had a very clear vision of what we wanted, beyond just what text we wanted on it, but also the graphics, the colors, and the fonts (Optimus Princeps font and… I’m blanking on the name of the scripty one but I’ll find it). Knowing what you want is probably the number one toughest part of making your own invites but if you can figure it out down to the last detail, the designing process will be much easier. Well, either that, or you have to be a non-controlling bride who trusts her graphic designer with her life.

Printing them was relatively painless, in fact, arguably the easiest part of the entire project. I was lucky enough to have access to a laser printer at work so I did it there. I had to feed the card stock in sheet by sheet, (50 pieces) but hey, can’t complain—it was free.

I then had to cut those again… more adventures with X-Acto blades. God I hate those things now. At least we (read: Mr. Sea Breeze) learned our lesson from the cutting the first stacks of dark and light purple card stock, so we did them one by one. Tedious, but STRAIGHT.

We had originally planned on making the back of the invitations interesting too by putting a 1.5″ ribbon on it (which wouldn’t show on the front as it would be tucked behind one of the layers - you can see a bit of it peeking out in the invite above). In my head I had a vision of our initials on the ribbon so I got the designer to make me a page of cute logo-ized initials, reversed so I could print them on iron-transfer paper. Neat idea, right? Unfortunately, it didn’t come out quite like my vision. Rather than just the initials on the ribbon, the clear plasticky background got ironed on too, so it looked like a big piece of tape stuck on the ribbon. Gross. Sadly, I don’t have a picture of this step. Needless to say, I ditched the big ribbon idea.

Tip #2 - Before you waste time designing things you should really try it out first to make sure it works. Sounds simple, I know, but you’d be surprised how your brain doesn’t work sometimes.

Then came the big gluing day. I opted for spray glue which was the right thing to do, I think. It was much faster and provided less opportunities for lumpy invitations. I originally set up our mini-factory on the patio but it was a bit chilly. So, Mr. SB flexed his MacGuyver skills and set us up in a spare bedroom by the open window and with a fan pointed at us from behind to push the glue fumes out.

Tip #3 - When using spray glue, make sure there’s good ventilation. Doing it indoors IS possible though… just make sure you’re by an open window and close the door behind you so the smell gets pulled in one direction only.

Note: there will inevitably be some gluey clouds landing in places other than your paper - for instance, on your fiance’s arm hairs. (Ha ha ha! Sweet revenge for the paper cutting episode!) While Mr. SB sprayed the glue, I positioned the paper as best I could.

Tip #4 - to avoid going absolutely INSANE, remember that these are hand-made invitations and if you expect them to come out PERFECTLY like factory-made ones, you are delusional. Just kidding, you hopefully aren’t delusional. But save yourself lots of anxiety and “let go” of the perfectionism just a bit. I found breathing deeply helped. Plus, as Mr. SB told me time and time again, no one will notice they’re 2 millimeters off except for you.

One of the most disappointing parts of the process was the printing of the little travel info cards. Since we’re having a destination wedding, we had to include the contact info for our travel agent with the invitations. There are a lot of styles out there that include funky pockets that let you slip this kind of info inside, but since I was trying to keep the cost and effort to a minimum, we didn’t have pockets. I figured a small square card would be just as good, it didn’t have to be in a pocket.

When we were cutting the invitations, I had kept the scrap pieces of paper which I later decided would be perfect for the travel info cards. Well, the printer thought otherwise. It refused to accept paper that was so narrow, even after we fiddled with the settings for close to an hour. At last, brilliant Mr. SB suggested taping the narrow strips of card stock (about 4 inches wide) to a piece of white paper; I actually scoffed at the suggestion but then ate my words because it worked! It was a painstaking process, though. Then I had to cut them all. I was so glad when that part was over.

Then I got home and realized I had forgotten to include the ‘book by’ date on the cards. D’oh!!!!!!

Tip #5 - Proofread, proofread, proofread but don’t rely on just yourself. I proofread stuff all the time for my job so I thought hey, no problem! However, this DIY stuff makes you go nuts so get at least one other person to read it over!

I had to leave work early to make it to the scrapbooker supply store to buy 12 more sheets of purple paper. What a pain. Not to mention, I had to do all the printing and cutting again (at least this time, the stupid printer accepted the paper size!)

And if that wasn’t traumatizing enough, next was printing the addresses onto the envelopes. Although I loved the iridescent envelopes I found at Scrapbookers Warehouse, I found it hard to justify paying $0.99 each for something that would inevitably end up in the garbage (I still delude myself in thinking people will keep the invitation, ha). I actually found pretty nice envelopes at Staples that were a very light speckled purply gray so we went with those—they also had light blue, green and rose, in varying sizes.

We had collected and organized our guests’ addresses in an Excel spreadsheet so the mail merge in Word was supposed to be easy. And it might have been, if the printer hadn’t been so complicated. We had to try ten million different settings before we finally figured it out. But it sure beat hand-writing them all, and it looked much more professional than my original idea of using clear labels.

I also had a moment of self doubt somewhere in there where I thought that maybe I should go with a ribbon after all—not, of course, with the ribbon I had already bought and lost the receipt for because that would be too easy, but with this lovely turquoise ribbon I had bought half a meter of at Fanny’s Fabrics three weeks earlier just to see if I could use it somehow. I would have had to make Mr. SB drive out all the way there to get more, not to mention how much more complicated the gluing process would become. In the end, I opted to leave out the ribbon as I felt the design was funky enough without it… much to the enormous relief of Mr. SB, who, I found out later, had prepped everyone I had asked advice for and pleaded for them to tell me the ribbon was dumb. What a sneak.

So finally, we were done.

Well, except for putting the invites and cards in the envelopes, sealing them (with a sponge—as if I was licking all those) and putting stamps on all 93 of them (the rest will be hand-delivered). That part was easy-peasy compared to the rest, though.

Thank goodness THAT is over!

Anyone else sort-of regret that they went the DIY invite route?