I thought it might be fun to show a few elements from our wedding that we created ourselves. I just think there are far too many crazy difficult wedding-related things on this little internet of ours. There is simply SO much wedding inspiration out there it becomes overwhelming and frankly a little discouraging... cause you can't do everything. And you don't want to copy everyone else's ideas. And what gets me the most is the impression that's given that everyone should have an endless budget and throw money at it like a maniac! There are far too few resources for brides (and grooms) looking to do things affordably, without compromising on the look and feel of the day. Okay, maybe you'll compromise on things because of money, yes. But good taste is good taste and it has nothing to do with money.
If you want to see the inspiration for the feel of our wedding, see my Wedding pinterest board, by clicking
here.
So I will share the first thing we made ourselves in the whole process: invitations, of course!
I wanted them to be more than some coloured paper glued together... I love texture and mixing materials, and I had noticed lots of different things that are, indeed, paper but are not normal card-making papers. I guess re-purposing is what I'm getting at. And since a mix of neutrals was the look I wanted, there was no concern over matching turquoises or anything like that.
The front sheet was ivory linen-textured card stock we found at Micheal's on sale. I think it was something like 30c a sheet. We cut it to size, printed the text using our friend's laser printer, and used a punch to round the corners ($20). The paper doilies are from the dollar store. I think we bought 6 packs of 15ish at $1 a pack. The kraft-paper cardstock on the bottom was a $25 stack from Micheal's which had all different patterns but the Kraft brown background in common. I had originally planned to use torn out sheets from an old dictionary to provide this 'patterned' layer. But when the time came, the yellowed dictionary I had was a really off colour next to the other whites and it just didn't work. So when we found this stack at Micheal's, we went for it. And we used every last sheet, so it was worth the money. The return envelopes came from Value Village. I love perusing their stationary section and had found airmail envelopes there before so I found more luckily. And I bought the large envelopes from Grand & Toy near my work because I literally couldn't seem to find them anywhere else ($8/25 I think). This is the largest envelope you can mail with standard postage and it made sense since we had the long airmail envelopes to fit in there. Also, I honestly can't get over the price of envelopes at places like Micheal's. I went to look for some for our thank-you cards but then realised it would have been like $1/envelope! And I don't want shimmery gold thank you very much! (their white envelopes all seemed to come with cards. I remedied this another way. WHOLE other post...)
The thread for sewing the sheets together was stuff already lying around so call it free. Some people's had brown thread, some read, but my favorites were just black thread. I used glue dots from the dollar store for attaching the top invite card to the doily paper. ($2)
By far, the thing that took the longest was choosing the fonts and laying out the wording. We found that by making some words grey and some black, it made the whole thing look a lot more legible and kinda professional looking. Thanks to DaFont.com for the fonts Peach Sundress and Return To Sender !
The other text was all Rockwell. Everything was laid out in Word and printed on a desktop printer. Simple.
The back held the RSVP card, which was sewn on together with the doily and the kraft card stock. (that was easier than you might think too. Stack them, and push them through the sewing machine one after the other. Cut them apart later.) Before sewing the RSVP on though I took them through the sewing machine with an unthreaded needle to give it a perforation. Most people figured out that that meant you could tear it off. :)
The Cow, Chicken and Carrots graphics were all found within 5 minutes of Google image searching.
Love the internet. They, again, were correctly interpreted by most. :)
I was really attached to the idea of a hand-drawn map or something really cutesy, but frankly we didn't have the time. We just printed a Google Map to show how to get to the park as well as a park map to show how to get to the lodge. It looked better than I expected just because of the coloured paper background.
And that's all folks! I think all in all we spent more on stamps than on the invitations by far, so I would call it a success. And it was really really fun to do!
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