Weddingbee Blog

Now that the invitations have gone out, I can actually write about them here. Considering it’s been my biggest DIY project so far, I’ve been antsy to share! With not many invitations to send out, we had a lot of freedom in how elaborate we could be. In keeping with the beach theme, I thought it would be really cute to send the invites as a message in a bottle. A while back, Mr. Nachos and I played around on the computer and made a mock of what we might want the paper part of the invitations to look like (this was even before we had a date picked) and we ended up sticking with our original idea.

Then I looked around online for pictures and inspiration and stumbled across this awesome website a woman published with step-by-step instructions on how she made hers, where she bought everything, how much it cost, and what worked and what didn’t:

How To Make Your Message in a Bottle Invitations

Apparently I’m not the first person to think of this (although I still like to think I am). I found the bottles we wanted online at Specialty Bottle and they were cheap! I ordered these with the corks, plus boxes to ship them in…

Our bottles for $1.15 each - not bad! (source)

And the boxes with bubble wrap were a whopping $0.77 each. I ordered 14 so we could make one for ourselves, too. With shipping, it all came out to a little over $40.

Once I had the bottles in hand, I took a trip to Hobby Lobby where I bought shells (large and small), fragrance, bags of shredded paper (which I later realized is the biggest crock of poop, don’t ever waste your money on it when you can shred your own!), and twine. I decided I was going to print out the paper portion of the invitations on my plain old computer printer. However, I hit a snag when I ran out of printer ink, so I took an 11PM trip to Wal-Mart only to find they were out of the cartridge I needed.

Side note: have you seen this website? It’s pretty funny…

Anywho, I arrived back home and got the bottles ready for the invitations for the morning. I filled the bottles a little over 1/3rd of the way with plain sand, added more small shells than I thought I would (because they sink when the bottle is upright). I put in a few drops of the fragrance – I went with some fruity scent, I think it was pineapple cilantro something-or-other. I thought all of the other ones, although they all had pretty names like tropical bouquet and fresh mango, either smelled like my grandma’s perfume, or feet. I got nervous after putting the drops in because the oil initially made some of the sand stick to the sides, but that quickly came off with a little shake.

The next morning, I went out and bought the cartridge and some Starbucks, so I could finally finish the paper portion on a nice caffeine high. I printed them out, tore the sides in uneven rips all around the border, and then went outside and burned the edges with a lighter. A few thumb blisters later from lighting the lighter so many times, I took them all back inside, rolled them up, tied a bow of twine around them, put them in the bottles and corked them. The tricky part was rolling up the paper to a good length because if they were too short, you couldn’t get them out of the bottle. If they were too long, the cork hit the paper and bent it. I also found it easiest to roll it up around a pencil so the rolled width stayed uniform from top to bottom.

Voila!

Our Invitations

I also created RSVP cards that said:

We look forward to celebrating with you!

Please circle one and kindly RSVP by November 23^rd, 2009

We’ll “sea” you there / We’re all “tide” up

I filled the boxes with shredded paper, and decided to put the RSVPs under the bottles (although now that everyone has gotten them, some people actually missed the RSVP cards… oops! We should have put them on top, I guess!). Once the bottles were placed in the boxes, I added one large shell in with the stuffing, put a little more on top, then taped those boxes like crazy.

Boxed up and ready to go!

I actually threw one on the ground on purpose to make sure it wouldn’t break (’cause you know the word fragile isn’t fool-proof and it’s bound to happen) and it survived! We decided to put our extra invite on the mantle and I couldn’t be happier with the way they turned out.

Are you a DW bride? Were your invitations themed to reflect your wedding’s location?