Weddingbee Blog

Man, was I excited to finally get these stupid things in the mail. Honestly, what started as a labor of love grew into a labor of annoyance. Honestly, it wasn’t that bad, but I was behind schedule with them and that always frustrates me. Plus, we kept adding more people, and overall, it was driving me crazy. But I’m happy with them. They’re cute and simple. I think Rainbow Brite would be proud of my use of color, but they don’t look completely childish. I think I achieved a nice balance.

So, here’s the outside. I did a completely simple wrap-around since the invitation is designed to be pretty simple. I didn’t put a stamp on this because I’m obviously not really mailing this to Awesome, YA, but we used the dolphin stamp:

Via USPS

Mr. Cannon picked up the postage and he wasn’t concerned with what it looked like. Neither was I, so it worked for me. I was worried he would get the wedding cake stamp, but he didn’t. I think the wedding cake is cute, but it would work better for a more traditional, classic wedding than ours. The dolphin is more fun and brings this image from my secret muse to mind:

Image via Relevant Magazine / Art via Lisa Frank

Anyway, the back view is not too exciting, but here you go:

Once again, simple, clean, modern. When you get the envelope off you’re struck with this beauty:

Oh boy, those ribbons were fun to put together. And let me tell you, I put way too much thought into the placement of those hearts. I consulted many people on whether they should be centered or off-center, but finally went off-center because Mr. Cannon liked it better. After wrestling the ribbon off (hopefully—if it fell in transit, I curse the post office!) you’ll see this:

After pulling out the RSVP and info cards, you get this (with two RSVPs to show the front and back):

Tah-dah! I ordered all the paper products from paperandmore.com. I can’t recommend them enough. Everything was of incredible quality. There was an issue where I was missing ten folders from my order. When I realized it, I emailed them about it and within minutes someone emailed me back and said they’d send them immediately. I got a confirmation tracking email for the folders within an hour of emailing them about the issue, and got the folders themselves within two days. Talk about customer service! And on top of that, that package of folders was completely mangled by USPS machines, but their packaging was so good that the folders were still in perfect condition.

I was going to outsource printing, but Mr. Cannon thought that was a waste of money, so he printed them all himself on our little Canon printer. Then I cut everything to size (except the invitation- paper and more sell paper already sized to fit in their folders!) and used punches to make the paper hearts for the cover. Then I glued a ribbon around each invitation and glued the hearts on top of that.

I ordered the following from Paperandmore:

• Instant Adhesive Micro Squares (300 Squares)- (Quantity: 4)
• Himalaya Tiffany Blue Solid Pocket Folder (1 Card)- (Quantity: 15)
• Razzle Pink Solid Envelopes (50 Envelopes)- (Quantity: 2)
• Himalaya Tiffany Blue Solid Pocket Folder (50 Cards)- (Quantity: 1)
• Solid Bright White Card stock 80# (100 Sheets)- (Quantity: 1)
• Base for A7 Pocketfolds, 4 1/2″ x 6 1/2″ Solid Bright White Card stock 80# (50 Sheets)- (Quantity: 4)

That totaled $121.87 and also includes paper for our programs and rehearsal dinner invitations and envelopes for the rehearsal dinner invitations. We also spent $60.90 on postage. The invitation design was a free gift from Bridesmaid Machine Gun.

So, if you include postage and pretend all the money I spend at paper and more was for the invitations (which it wasn’t) you get a cost of $2.82 per invitation. Not bad, especially when you consider 93 cents of it is postage! Definitely worth some slight annoyances and a few evenings of work.

What do you think, hive? Did you DIY your invitations?