Weddingbee Blog

I never thought this day would come. OK…no…it’s not quite wedding day, but it’s mailing the invitations day! And after printing and cutting and gluing and stuffing for the last four months, getting these bad boys out in the mail is cause for some serious celebration. Aren’t they purdy?!???

OK…

So, I know I’m not showing you much, but I want to give my good friends at the Post Office (*insert eye roll*) a few days to get them into the hands of our guests before I give you a full reveal. While we’re waiting though, I thought I’d share some things I learned during the whole process for those of you that are considering going the DIY route. Here goes:

1. Slow and steady wins the race. The DIY route for invitations (particularly if they are multi-layered with several inserts like ours) takes a ton of time. The only reason I didn’t go insane was ’cause I did a little at a time over the course of several months. I printed the main invitation one weekend, inserts one weekend, envelope liners one weekend, belly bands another weekend, addressing envelopes another weekend…OK, you get it. My point is, it’s super time consuming, and trying to do a ton at once could be overwhelming. Knocking out a little bit at a time is definitely the way to go.
2. Think about the hidden costs. My main reason for DIY invitations was so that we could get really cute invitations for about half the cost of paying someone else to do them. Well, I think our invitations are really cute, but I don’t know that they were half the cost. I didn’t think about the extra things like adhesives, a new paper trimmer (’cause the one I had was a little crappy), additional paper stock (’cause I screwed up some of the printing), and more adhesives (’cause it took a lot of adhesive to stick everything together) when I originally decided to DIY. Those costs definitely add up.
3. Don’t DIY if you don’t like to DIY. Even though our invitations took a ton of time, they were truly a labor of love. OK, I know that phrase is so overused, but it’s true! I never dreaded working on our invitations, and I even (dare I say) enjoyed working on them. I’m so happy that I DIYed our invitations, but if the whole creative process of figuring out what you want the invitations to look like and then printing, cutting, gluing and assembling them doesn’t sound appealing…don’t do it! There are amazingly beautiful invitations out there for sale, and tons of talented people that will do it all for you if you want.

What other things did you learn from DIYing your invitations?