Weddingbee Blog

You wanna know how early we did our invitations? You really want to know? 11 and a half months before our wedding date. Which, in case you’re counting, was right before the actual proposal!

Don’t worry, we weren’t nuts. Well, maybe a little, but hear me out. Basically, we had already been thinking about the wedding for awhile. We had a date and had booked the venue (we had to book it a year and a half before the date because free dates for our venue were disappearing like chips at a picnic). Therefore, we knew all the important stuff that would have to go on the invitations.

As you may already know, my family lives in Indonesia most of the time, but I go over there to spend Christmas with them. So that time over Christmas 2009 gave me the perfect opportunity to scab of my mother and her craft tools. Plus, my tiny dorm room in NZ which has barely enough room for a bed isn’t exactly conducive to crafty goodness. Add in a nice large kitchen table at my parents’ house to the equation and making these invites at home was really the only way to go.

What I didn’t realise was all the obstacles we (my wonderful long-suffering mother and I) would encounter along the way to handmade invitation heaven:

1. All the blogs, DIY sites, etc that I visited in my search for easy invite inspiration said something along the lines of “only DIY your invites if you need 50 or less. Otherwise you will drive yourself crazy.” Darn. Well we needed 100. And we did 100. Was it fun? Well… let’s just say multiple cups of tea were needed and it is a damn good thing I had nothing much else to do at the time.
2. Our printer has issues. Seriously. I had to print out each little invite all by its lonesome, I couldn’t just stick in the number of copies I wanted and press Print because then the stupid thing would have a fit. *sigh* once again… yay for my mum! We set up a sort of factory line thing… her feeding paper and me pushing buttons. This pleased me… I like buttons.
3. Double-sided sticky tape. The roll we had was at least 20 years old. I’m not kidding. Apparently my mum had saved it for “a rainy day.” Unfortunately the day we used it happened to be at least 35 degrees Celsius and extra humid, but that is another story. So this tape—I can’t complain about its level of stickiness despite its age. The stuff could stick an elephant by its behind to a wall. But we just had to stick lace to card and we discovered that being stored in a dusty cupboard had left the tape with dirty edges. So what do we do? We painstakingly cut the dirty edges off each itty-bitty piece of tape *double sigh* Remind me again why that was MY job??? Oh, and before you ask “why couldn’t you just go buy a new roll?” We were in the middle of nowhere on a random Indonesian island. Double-sided tape doesn’t grow on trees.
4. Stamping and embossing. OK, actually I thought this part was fun. Only on the journey between stamping, hurriedly pouring embossing powder over the image, and then running to the heat tool to melt it and back caused me to lose a whole kilo over a week (YES… it took a whole week… just for the stamping part…)
5. I’m tape challenged! Or all-things-sticky-challenged, either one. It just gets all over me… I’m not sure how… *sad face while she sits with sticky dots attached to her eyebrows*

However! For anyone wanting to go the same route as me, don’t let all these little obstacles put you off. After all is said and done, I truly think it was worth it.

And here is why:

Yeah, I didn’t blur out our first names. No stalkers, please.

We used purple and cream scrapbooking card from a craft store, some pretty ivory floral lace I found on the cheap, and a variety of rose-themed stamps that my mother already owns (we couldn’t decide on just one stamp so we just used all the rose ones she had!). Plus silver ink and embossing powder. The information card was cut using some decorative scissors, and we put them all in some pretty textured cream envelopes and sealed them with another rose stamp (this time un-embossed). The total cost for 100 invites, including various supplies and envelopes was $100.99. Cool, eh?

They make me happy! Not because they are perfect—they’re not. I’m not the world’s best crafter and never will be, but I am PROUD of these.

My mother and I worked hard on them and the finished product sums up perfectly what I had envisioned for my and Mr E’s special day. They are US: a bit mismatched and rough around the edges, but to me and him—just awesomeness.

(just one more because I can’t resist)

We will be sending the invites out next month, as we have already had people needing to know details so they can make holiday plans (our wedding date is right smack in the middle of when many people here go on their summer/Christmas vacation PLUS we have a ton of overseas guests), and will have an early RSVP date also so that people don’t forget to do it in the middle of their Christmas shopping.

P.S. Did I mention I got to use LACE? *excited*

Stay tuned… for those of you who love stamps, I have a heat-embossing tutorial coming up next!

*All photos in this post taken by the ever-willing Mr E.