Weddingbee Blog

Hive, my invites are DONE and SENT. I can’t tell you how relieved I am about this. Paper is up there on the “list of things I really care about” so I think I put a lot of pressure on myself for the invitations—and this turned out to be a DIY doozie. Apologies in advance, but I’m splitting up my posts about them because there were a lot of mini projects involved with getting them out the door. Roughly, there’s three overall components to the final product:

• the envelope and liner
• the invitation format
• wording and design

I’ll start with the outer shell. I ordered envelopes in a creamy color—I toyed with doing grey envelopes and printing addresses in white, but I wasn’t confident that it would work and I definitely wanted to print on them to keep the fonts standard.

I also wanted to incorporate some watercolor, a la this:

(Envelope via Elizabeth Anne Designs / by Jordan Ferney)

Alas, when we tried to watercolor the envelopes, it was way too wet…we were accidentally sealing my envelopes! I think if I’d gotten nicer envelopes, it would have been okay. But, my mom suggested we try chalking to get a similar effect:

Basically I took what was like a thimble with a foam end (top left of photo) and placed a ripped piece of cardstock on the envelope. Then, I just traced down the paper with some gray chalk.

Cool right? I was kind of worried that it would smudge the printer, but it turned out fine.

After the chalking, I ran the envelopes (these plus my RSVP envelopes) through the printer. I know I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but printing on envelopes is a pain in the ass. I used this tutorial to figure out how to do the mail merge stuff, and then this one was most helpful for the actual printing. With the chalking and the DC stamps (half of which I used on my save the dates), I think they turned out pretty nice:

I ended up having to add a 20 cent stamp on these. Stupid square envelopes.

On the inside, I did a liner using this map paper:

(Paper via Paper Source / by Cavallini)

I originally wanted to copy Mrs. Treasure and do a skyline, but DC’s landmarks aren’t really conducive to a single photo and I couldn’t find one I liked. I figured a map would be easy and also sort of bring the travel stuff in.

Mom cutting through Europe. Merciless.

If I did it again, I’d pick an envelope that would highlight a liner better, but I still think the effect is cool.

Next…the construction!