Weddingbee Blog

Hive, do you remember when I showed you my first attempt at DIY wedding invitations? You all had such wonderful things to say about what I whipped up in PowerPoint. Well, after I put this working template together, I didn’t touch our invitations for quite a few months. In fact, I almost completely forgot about them.

Then, as we quickly approached our due date for sending out the Parasol wedding invitations, I decided I should probably look at our invitations again—just to make sure I still liked them—and work on any final edits. For any of you who forgot, here’s what they looked like:

Personal photo

Hive, I hated them. I looked at them, and I just wasn’t happy. I don’t know what happened. I was so proud of them before. But when I looked at them again, they just felt really amateurish to me. And that is not how I want our wedding invitations to look.

I have also become obsessed with a new and fabulous wedding trend: bunting! When I started thinking about our invitations again, I was in the midst of making tons and tons of bunting for the wedding. So with bunting on the brain, I set out to make a new invitation suite. Here’s the first official draft I came up with:

Personal photo

I love this invitation so much more than the first one I made. It’s clean, fun, and colorful, and I love how joyful and celebratory it looks. And I’m no graphic designer (if you couldn’t already tell), but I think this looks much more professional than the other invitation. Maybe people will know that I made this myself, but they probably won’t think it looks amateurish.

I’d like to say that Mr. Parasol and I quickly threw together some matching insert cards, sent them off to the printer, assembled the entire suite, and popped these lovelies in the mail. I’d like to say that if only because that would mean the process of making our invitations was actually incredibly easy and stress free.

But I can’t say that. Instead, I want to level with you about DIY wedding invitations.

Hive, they are. So. Freaking. Hard.

Putting together the initial template was easy. Reformatting everything a billion times over? Not so much. Mr. Parasol and I spent countless hours poring over font sizes and spacing, moving the bunting a little to the right or to the left, and fiddling with the margins. Then we’d notice that one little thing was off, we’d have to resize the entire suite, and we’d have start the whole reformatting process all over again.

Parasol Wedding Invitations Command Central / Personal photo

Let me tell you: it was not fun. Not fun at all.

Then catastrophe struck. Mr. Parasol and I went to get the invitations printed in the midst of one of the most stressful mornings we’ve ever had. Things were crazy, and we couldn’t believe how much the printing place kept messing up the formatting we’d worked so hard to get just right. I finally turned to Mr. Parasol and begged him to let me sit in the car while he finalized everything. The tears were practically running down my face: I was so overwhelmed. Of course, Mr. Parasol was a total champ and told me he’d take care of the rest and officially excused me from wedding-invitation duty.

We thought everything was great. The printing place finally got everything “right,” they put our order in, and then a few hours later, they called us to come pick up our invitations. Mr. Parasol quickly assembled an invitation suite in one of our pocket-fold envelops and handed it to me to inspect.

Again, I’d like to say that I loved it. I’d like to say that it was exactly what I had envisioned.

But it wasn’t.

The insert cards were all off. None of them were the same width, and the heights weren’t proportional, so they looked really funny stacked in the pocket fold together. Then the bunting was completely messed up on the invitations themselves. Instead of looking like cute flags, they had been stretched so much vertically that they looked like sharp fangs. Not good. Some of the colors weren’t what they were supposed to be either, and a lot of the text was off center.

I seriously wanted to cry. I know that in the grand scheme of things these are really minor issues, and most of our guests wouldn’t have noticed anyway. But I noticed. I hated that I had spent hours pouring myself into this project, making it perfect, and then the end result came out with so many (glaring) mistakes. These weren’t what I wanted our invitations to look like, and I hated that this is what we had.

Hive, if I have one piece of advice about DIY wedding invitations (aside from lots and lots of patience), it’s this: print out a mock-up of your entire invitation suite before you print out all of your invitations. This is the part we skipped. Between the stress of the morning and our desire to just finish the invitations already, this minor but important part of the DIY-invitation puzzle slipped through the cracks. And if we had simply done this, we wouldn’t have been stuck with an entire box of invitations we didn’t want to use.

Seriously, print as many mock-ups as necessary until your invitations are perfect. Do not go ahead with printing everything until you have a mock-up you are totally satisfied with.

Want to know what the Parasols decided to do about their DIY-invitation disaster? Be sure to stayed tuned!

Did you have any serious DIY mishaps like Mr. Parasol and me? How did you handle the disappointment?