Weddingbee Blog

But you know what that means—the Macarons’s invitations have been sent! I started these babies eaarrrrly. I didn’t want to procrastinate or get hit with creative’s block and have a mad dash at the end. The good news is that they didn’t take nearly as long as I expected and were completely finished in February. The bad news is that I had to stare at them every day for over five months before I finally mailed them. (OK, so I sent them a few weeks earlier than recommended. I can’t help it—I’m impatient!)

So without further ado, here’s the big reveal:

The entire suite was printed on pearl metallic card stock and the invitation was attached to lavender metallic card stock. Since I printed everything myself, I intentionally made the invitation smaller so I could take advantage of Paper and More’s pre-cut paper for the backing.

I originally wanted to illustrate a map, but found it rather difficult as our ceremony location isn’t really near anything. That meant if I wanted to include cute illustrations of Ybor City or the stadium, it’d have to be zoomed out to the point where it’d cease to be useful.

Instead I made a details card that included the important stuff: how our guests could access our special room rate and the Farm’s address. I also included our website again (since some people didn’t notice it on our save the dates) and told them to visit it for detailed directions and more information. In then end I’m glad I canned the map; it would have been too much and would have competed with the rest of the look and feel of our suite.

In order to keep the postage costs down, I made the details card the same size as the reply card.

Neither my home printer nor office printer liked the 4bar envelopes (both are Hewlett Packards…hmm), so that meant I’d have to hand address them or come up with another alternative. Hand addressing was out. I didn’t want the work I was so proud of to be poopoo-ed up with my handwriting. A wraparound label would have been the simplest option, but why would I do that? Instead I hand cut each label, echoing the frame on our invites.

The details card and reply card were placed on top of the reply envelopes and held in place on the back of the invite by twine. Both envelopes were lined with the same “foofer” pattern you see on the rest of the pieces, except it was reversed out on a lighter gray and printed on text-weight pearl metallic paper.

When it came to addressing them I gave etiquette the finger! I know typed addresses are generally frowned upon, but I didn’t care. A lot of time went into the design, printing, and trimming (oh god the trimming) of our invitations. Even then, I set each address by hand, character by character, till each alternate and glyph worked.

The back of the envelopes got a little extra attention as well.

Our invitations were a labor of love and I hope it shows. I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out and can’t wait to see what our guests think. Psst—that’s what the comments section is for!

If you could do it all over, would you still take the DIY approach?