Weddingbee Blog

So, our invitations weren’t done nearly as early as I originally planned. I originally wanted to do the invites myself, but due to time constraints, I didn’t think it was possible. So, a few months ago I had started looking into pricing to have the invites done by either an online company or a graphic designer. I kind of hit sticker shock with all the companies I looked at online and my first choice graphic designer couldn’t do it due to her own busy schedule, so I put it off for a while.

At the three month mark, I realized I still had no clue what we were doing for invitations. Most wedding checklists recommend ordering these 4-6 months before the wedding. After searching for simple, nautical inspired invites and having no luck finding exactly what I envisioned, I decided to just suck it up and do them myself. I originally didn’t think I’d have time to do it between other wedding planning and being a new homeowner, but we’ve been pretty good at scheduling other things for the wedding, and we’ve been taking our home plans very slow. I knew if I did the invites myself they wouldn’t be elaborate, but at least they’d resemble my vision.

I ended up being extremely surprised at how quick I was able to make and print these—granted I did a super simple design and used a program I’m extremely familiar with—Microsoft Word. It took a couple hours to design them, two nights after work to print, and about three get-togethers to assemble. Then, realizing I hadn’t printed enough, another day printing out a few more and assembling.

I have a few reasons this process went so smoothly:

1. 1A practice run - when I originally wanted to do our invites, I used our Save the Dates as a practice run, I used many of the same materials for these, as I planned to use for the invites.
2. My new printer - when I had printed the save the dates, it took forever to print. So many came out wrong and the printer ended up breaking towards the end. This was a great trial and error for the invites. After this process, I researched printers and found a printer that works with smaller cardstock and the printing process went so smooth! I hadn’t realized prior to this that not all printers can handle smaller paper sizes.
3. Help from others - Sister Starfish and Starfish Mom helped me print and assemble these. All it took was a bribe of Chinese food, left over shower cake, and a promise to watch Twilight and New Moon while assembling. Actually, the promise of Twilight and New Moon didn’t really help the cause with Starfish Mom, but she came anyways. On night one of assembly, it was especially helpful to have them there. I printed the invites, while Sister Starfish stamped and Starfish Mom embossed. Stamping and embossing over 100 invites alone would not have been fun.
4. Double sided tape - I was planning to use glue sticks to put the backing on the invite, but Sister Starfish told me I was crazy and that I need to get double sided tape. It was much quicker and cleaner.
5. Choosing a program I’m familiar with - I originally planned to use Adobe InDesign or Adobe Pagemaker. I use both at work, but not frequently. If I had the time, I would have gone with Adobe InDesign, but I didn’t have enough time to research how to use the program more in depth. That brought me to Microsoft Word. I’m familiar with it, and although I couldn’t do any intricate designs, it got the job done in a time crunch.

Overall, the invites are pretty simple, but Mr. Starfish and I love them. They are hopefully being sent out to our guests within the next few weeks, so you’ll just have to wait and see.

Did you create your own invites? Was the process what you expected?