Weddingbee Blog

Yowza! I’m so excited to (finally) share our entire invitation suite with all you lovely people. If you’ve been following along with my extremely bizarre anatomy analogy (it just popped into my head one day, go figure), then you’ve already seen the skin and bones of our invitations. And you’re dying to see more. Or you’re just sick of how drawn out this reveal is, but indulge the crazy a little mkay?

I promise I’ll shut up now and get to the point already. Set. Go. We’ll start with…

Our awesome invitation suite:

I have no words, just LOVE!

Again from a different angle:

And now one yummy little detail at a time starting with…

The envelope:

Black Envelopes/White Calligraphy make me swoon. The Envelopes are 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 Squares from Paper-Source. And big thanks to Cupcake for her amazing post on designing your own invites—the tip on starting with the envelopes was invaluable! As for calligraphy, I had the best luck using cheapie white gel pens and I made it up as I went along—no way we could afford a pro! Bonus: I picked up a new skill.

The inner envelope:

It became apparent that we needed a way to bundle up the many pieces of our invite and the translucent vellum envelopes offered a little glimpse of our custom artwork. We ordered 6×6 envelopes here and the service was lovely and quick.

The name tag:

Probably my favorite part. I have miles and miles of muslin lying around the house, and with the stamps I already had this was a totally free and uber personal way to inform our guests exactly who was included in their invitation.

Don’t worry! We didn’t forget Michelle:

Each guest got their own little muslin tag and for friends who we gave a +1 to, there was an additional tag that said “and guest.”

The inner envelope’s backside:

Sigh. More vellum goodness.

Our actual invitation/RSVP tag:

I designed our invitations in Illustrator and printed them off our home printer onto Paper Bag text weight paper from Paper Source. CAUTION: While the text weight of paper bag looks exactly like a brown paper bag in delicious shade/tone/texture, the cover weight is a different/disappointing color and not nearly as awesome/tactile. Since we printed the invites on a lightweight paper, we backed ‘em with some black Arches paper from an art store.

And Again:

Not that anyone will notice (except maybe a few paper-crazed readers) but all the paper for our invitations was torn with a tearing edge ruler so as to have a lovely deckle…

An original lino print by moi:

Did I say the tags were my favorite part? I lied. The artwork is my favorite favorite. It was really important to us that we included something with our invitations that our guests could actually keep/use/display. Now I know the peeps we invited love us and all that jazz, but I don’t really expect that they’re gonna cherish and/or display our envelope or the text of our invitation. But maybe, just maybe, they’ll hang on to an easily frame-able piece of art?! (IKEA, Ribba $4.99, and yes we made the art this size on purpose.) Or not. C’est la vie. The art gets its own post, so I’ll shut up now.

RSVP Tag:

We were a little (teeny tiny) bit green after all and opted not to do RSVP cards/envelopes. Or we were cheap and didn’t wanna shell out left for stamps… Anyhoo, these manilla tags are a job liability of mine (they’re lying around everywhere) so we decided to put them to good use and let our guests know to check our website for more info and to RSVP.

And FINIS.

Thanks for being so attentive and indulging my crazy! In the end our invitations are exactly what we wanted them to be—unique, artistic, informal, and affordable. We did spend a considerable (incalculable?!) amount of time on them though, so if you’re planning on going the DIY route I recommend starting EVEN earlier than you are planning. Maybe even before you get engaged.

What do you think lovelies? Is DIY worth it to you or would you rather shell out the cold hard cash?