I mentioned in this post that we are now DIY-ing (sorta) our invites. The whole reason we are doing this is because we couldn’t find something just perfect out there, even on Etsy. Etsy certainly gave us a few good starting-off points, but not the real thing. Okay, let’s design our own. How do we start?
I started by drawing! I For the longest time I had no idea what I wanted our invites to look like, and just kept trawling invite sites, expecting to see the perfect thing ready-made. That never happened, and the more I searched the more I realised what I didn’t like, and finding things that were close-but-no-cigar helped me to find what it was I really wanted. Here are a few of my early sketches, scanned up for your viewing pleasure.
The top one on this page is mine, the one below Cinnamon Buns drew!
Can you tell what they are? I hope you can! I was trying to sketch out a bookcase, with all our info on the spines of the books. As you can see, I also tried hanging a picture frame above the bookcase, to put some text in that. My parents are paying for a lot of the wedding, and it is a big deal for my mum to have the ‘Dr & Mrs Cinnamon Bun request the pleasure of your blah blah blah’ on the invite. I didn’t realise this was the custom at first, when I was looking at invites the week after getting engaged. So many of the cute ones on Etsy say ‘Together with their parents…’ or even ‘Miss Cinnamon Bun and Cinnamon Buns are getting hitched!’ but those were never to be.
Doing these sketches, then talking about them helped us figure out what we wanted, and what we wanted to put on there. At that point I felt comfortable enough to do a scale drawing. I drew out a 5×7 rectangle on one of my favourite pads of paper (I love graph paper!), and did up a neat version:
Not too bad, I think? I also kept thinking that bookcases are long and tall, so why don’t we try a slightly more interesting size, like 4×9? So I drew up a 4×9:
I didn’t finish inserting the info, as it will be the same as the one above. On this one, I put the long sentence on the wall, as I was worried it might get a bit too crammed to read on tiny book spines. My thinking with that was that it would be in a really swirly font, and could almost look like swirly wallpaper behind the bookcase, and we could even have a few swirls (like a tail on an R or the edge of an ampersand) peeking out around the sides of the bookcase. That idea is a little hard to put into words, but it works in my head.
The last two scans are what I sent to our graphic designer. I feel that I’m not that bad at drawing stuff like this with a pencil, but know I could not get it to look nice on the computer. I just don’t have the knowledge. Or even the program! This is where friends with training come in. 
What do you think so far?
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