Weddingbee Blog

Okay, since the RSVPs have started to roll in, it’s finally time to reveal the Armadillo wedding invites! Keep in mind these were made 100% by hand, printed on our rinky dink home computer and cut and assembled by yours truly (along with a LOT of help from Mr. A.). While not everything went exactly the way I envisioned, overall I was really happy with the way they turned out.

Okay, enough chitter chatter! Onto the photos!

First up is a photo of the front of the envelope. I kinda went against the grain of etiquette and decorum by NOT handwriting the names and addresses on the front; rather, we ran each envelope through our home printer using the font Jellyka Western Princess, which I downloaded for free from fonts101.com. Mr. A and myself are both lefties, which, if you could imagine two left-handed people trying to write on metallic silver envelopes, all that would have probably resulted would have been smudge overload (and lots of frustrated tears!) I thought the font we picked lent itself to looking handwritten, and many of our guests have comment on how pretty the calligraphy is! I had to confess that it wasn’t “real” to them, but I don’t think they minded.

We did a corner embossing on the front of each envelope using a pretty little flourish stamp I stumbled on at Hobby Lobby. I thought it really amped up the fancy factor and loved the finished result!

We also used the O. Henry and George Washington stamps, which we ordered from the USPS website. I tried to make the stamps somewhat relevant and meaningful, so we went with O. Henry because of his famous short story “The Gift of the Magi,” which is about a newlywed couple who each sells their most prized possession to buy the other a Christmas gift. George Washington also made the cut because Mr. A was a history minor in college.

On the backside of the envelope, we continued the embossing theme. Lil Dillo was a HUGE help with this part of the process, as she was master of the heat gun.

We printed the return addresses on the back flaps using the same font that we used on the front:

When guests opened the envelope, they saw this:

We bundled everything together using 6mm silver ribbon and attached a little tag with our DIY monogram motif on it, which tied the entire suite together (both literally and aesthetically!).

The main invitation portion was printed on bright white linen cardstock and matted on extra thick green apple cardstock, both of which were from paperandmore.com. I designed the purple flourish graphic myself, and the fonts we used were Albemarle Swash (the more decorative one) and Poor Richard (the sub-font.).

We decided to go with an RSVP postcard to save a few cents on stamps and not have to include a second envelope, but brides who are planning on doing the same thing and are mailing invites out soon, BEWARE: Postage is officially going up by one cent at the end of this month, so make sure you add the appropriate extra amount so you actually receive your RSVPs.

We also added identifying numbers to the corner of each RSVP which correlated to a matching list of guests just in case anyone forgot to put their names on the front!

We also added a second insert, which directed our guests to our wedding website for more information:

And the entire suite all laid out:

As happy and proud as I was with these, we definitely ran into a few snags. First, the green cardstock I originally had planned on using had been discontinued by the time we actually went to order them, so I had to settle for the apple green color (the one I originally planned on using was Cards and Pockets’ “citron.”). We also had our RSVP postcards printed through Vistaprint (we wanted to make sure the size was the right size for a postcard) and the color of white was gray in comparison to the color of the white cardstock we used to make everything else. Lastly, we had to use two different widths of silver ribbon because Wal-Mart didn’t have enough of one or the other. Not huge hiccups by any means, but when you want things to be perfect and work for months and months on something, it’s a bummer when things don’t quite work out like you plan.

Anyway, I plan on doing a second post with a price breakdown and more in-depth discussion of HOW I made these (what tools I used, etc.), so stay tuned for that! I’m so super duper proud of these, and the responses we’ve received from our guests have been overwhelmingly flattering. I feel like the invitations are the first glimpse guests see in regard to the feel of the wedding, and I hope our guests are excited about what is to come!

Did you end up doing completely DIY invites for your wedding? What were some of the hiccups or snags you encountered during the process?