Weddingbee Blog

Mr. Dolphin and I were very busy bees. We worked on assembling our invitations… and boy, theses babies sure were a labor of love.

Check out those sweet wrap-around address labels
Photography by Mr. Dolphin (of course!)

I think I must have cut a gazillion sheets of paper. Good thing I have experience with blades (architecture student… enough said)!

Poor Mr. Dolphin was a hopeless mess at cutting invitations… all the ones he tried to cut came out crooked. But, he has found his calling as the ultimate gluer! Truth be told, these babies took an incredible amount of time, but were sooooo worth it!

The best part about working on our invitations? Spending some much needed quality time with Mr. Dolphin.

Sometimes it’s really nice to turn the TV and computer off, and do something together. When Mr. Dolphin asked me what I wanted to do for Valentine’s Day, I said that I just wanted to do something together. So… we not only worked on invitations, but decided to tackle cleaning, painting, and organizing our laundry room over Valentine’s Day weekend (I’m probably the only person who finds this exciting).

Mr. Dolphin has been on my case for WEEKS to write this post because so many of our guests had no idea that we had designed and made our invitations ourselves. And, hey… we deserve some credit!

Over winter break, I designed the bulk of our invitation suite. We decided then that we would print and assemble our invitation ourselves, and send our RSVP postcard and accommodations card off to Overnight Prints, to save us time and money.

Want to see our little labor of love? I hope you do! Here they are {hooray}!!!

The envelopes, all prettified with their Vancouver Olympics stamps and the cute wrap-around address label we made.
photo by Miss Dolphin

What our guests see as they open their invitation to our wedding.
photo by Mr. Dolphin

More postage. I do love fun stamps! This RSVP card was sent out to our Canadian family in Newfoundland!
photo by Mr. Dolphin

Our wedding invitation!!! Hooray!!! photo by Miss Dolphin

These were really the only part of our set that we actually had to put together, since the rest we had ordered from Overnight Prints (saving us valuable time and money). That being said, it certainly wasn’t a fast or easy task putting these babies together. There was so much cutting and gluing involved that I seriously don’t want to see an X-Acto blade or cutting mat for at least a few weeks!

Here are our RSVP postcards and accommodation cards printed through Overnight Prints. Photo by Miss Dolphin

They did an amazing job with printing them, they are very sturdy, and the RSVP postcards held up well in the mail, which makes for a happy bride!

Here are all out invitation pieces (minus the super cute gold shimmer envelope with wrap-around label) showing the reverse sides of the RSVP card and the accommodation cards. The map was made by Mr. Dolphin’s dad. Photo by Miss Dolphin

Overall, Mr. Dolphin and I are very happy with how they turned out. We love the little RSVP postcards (it has been a lot of fun getting them back), and the map Mr. Dolphin’s dad made is just too cute! The only thing that Mr. Dolphin and I agree that we would have changed was how we glued them. We used a glue stick to glue the layers together of our main invitation. Bad idea. When we went back home and saw our invitations on family and friends’ fridges we discovered they had warped terribly from heat and moisture and the layers were starting to pull apart from each other. This was incredibly upsetting for Mr. Dolphin and me since we had invested so much time into trying to make these invitations perfect in our eyes.

After seeing how the glue stick SUCKED, I tried a few invitations just using double sided tape and they have been holding up pretty well. We’ll see how that goes.

Okay, so now for the all important price break down!

• Envelope Mall: 100 Gold Stardream A7 envelopes and 100 Quartz Stardream 81lb sheets $41.19
• Envelope Mall: 100 Aquamarine 81lb Stardream sheets $21.42
• Paper-Papers: 50 Gold 105lb Stardream sheets because they were sold out at Envelope Mall $24.30
• Overnight Prints: 100 double sided postcards for RSVPs, 100 double sided postcards for Accommodations/Map $60.91
• OnlineLabels: 98 (7.5″x1.5″) glossy labels for wrap-around address labels $18.87
• Postage: $72.20

GRAND TOTAL $238.89 at $3.14 an invitations set (including postage) for 76 invitations

$3.14 an invitation, including postage? Not bad in our book, considering postage ended up being around $1 per invite (and a little more for our Canadian guests).

Now lets compare our invitation set price to one that is similar on Wedding Paper Divas (one of my favorite stationery shops):

Wedding Paper Divas’ Stylish Sweet Invitation
I chose this one to price compare to ours, since they didn’t have any close to ours, and this one is super cute, and could have been a contender for our invites.

Wedding Paper Divas’ price? For 75 invitations, 75 response cards, and 75 reception cards the final price would be $285. This doesn’t include postage, additional two layers of paper behind the invitation (for a swanky border like ours), or labels for the front of the envelopes. There is also no map for this price, and the postage would cost us more considering the response cards are not postcards.

Sure, it would have been much faster and easier (and pricier) to just order our invitations but Mr. Dolphin and I had too much fun putting our invites together, we would have missed out on all that forced quality time together. We had so much fun designing our invitation suite together, and ordering pizza while we spent hours (upon hours) assembling all the pieces. I wouldn’t give that up for the world. I swear, our invitations have brought us closer together. For reals.

So, I say, if you want to DIY your invites, and you have a helpful future hubby, GO FOR IT! You will not regret it, plus your wallet will be thanking you! Just be sure to figure out that pesky glue situation, speaking of which…

What kind of glue/adhesive did you use to put your invitations together? How did it hold up? Please… I need to know!!