Weddingbee Blog

After our wedding-invitation disaster, Mr. Parasol and I had to make a decision: Should we send out the invitations we had, mistakes and all, or go back to the drawing board, fix the invitation suite, and then reprint everything? Mr. Parasol ultimately made the decision for us: we were going to fix and reprint all of our invitations. We just couldn’t send out the invitations as they were. We’d worked too hard on our DIY invitations to send out something we weren’t happy with and, thankfully, there was room in the budget for us to “splurge” on this.

And as if (almost) starting from scratch wasn’t complicated enough, we had to decide who would take charge of bringing this DIY project to completion: me or Mr. Parasol. You see, we printed our first invitation suite the day before Mr. Parasol left for Southern California. The original plan was to print the invitations and assemble them together. Obviously this was no longer on option. Either the invitation supplies stayed with me, or Mr. Parasol took them with him and finished them on his own.

We went back and forth for a while. I was the driving force behind the invitations at the beginning. I designed them almost entirely by myself, and I had a very clear vision of how the entire suite would look. Mr. Parasol, on the other hand, handled a larger portion of the reformatting tasks because he’s much more tech savvy than I am.

We ultimately came to a sort of compromise: Mr. Parasol would take the invitations and all the supplies with him to Southern California and reprint and assemble the suite, but not without my approval via Skype. We were dead-set on not repeating our previous mistake, and Mr. Parasol would not reprint all the invitations until we had a mock-up we both approved. I also gave Mr. Parasol detailed instructions for how to assemble the invitations, and we crossed our fingers that this time things would actually work out.

Hive, I’m happy to report that they did! Mr. Parasol did several mock-ups, he showed each one to me, we continued to tweak, and then, finally, we had a mock-up we were totally and completely happy with. Commence printing of the greatest DIY invitations ever made!

OK, not really, but I do fancy them quite a bit.

But before the big Parasol invitations reveal, check out this sneak peek of Mr. Parasol assembling our awesome DIY invitations.

All ready to go! / Personal photo

To save money, Mr. Parasol cut out all the invitations and inserts himself. / Personal photo

The assembly line / Personal photo

Working away! / Personal photo

We Parasols kept our belly bands simple: twine! / Personal photo

And, of course, you can’t forget the outer envelopes. / Personal photo

Throughout it all, Mr. Parasol was a total champ. I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to find a man who not only listened to my complaints about our first batch of wedding invitations, but who also worked so unceasingly to bring my vision to life. As you can probably tell from the pictures, bringing this project to completion was no easy task. But Mr. Parasol did it, and he never once complained.

I know you’re probably on pins and needles to see the final result. Don’t worry, pictures of our completed invitation suite are coming soon!

Has your fiancé(e) helped with any DIY projects?