Our DIY Wedding Invitations

It's been quite a while since my last wedding post, so I thought it was about time that I share our invitations with you!  I knew that I'd be designing them myself from the moment we started planning, but we'd initially intended on having them printed elsewhere.  As time went on and we started working on our endless DIY projects, we decided to print and assemble them ourselves as well.  I won't lie - it was majorly time consuming.  But we saved a ridiculous amount of money, even with the costs of high quality papers and archival inks.  Most importantly, it made us both really happy to know we did them ourselves from scratch.

To make the invitations, I first designed them in Photoshop. My goal was to create a typographic design that incorporated our colors, yellow and gray.  Robbie and I agreed that we wanted a somewhat minimalist design that was fun and expressed our personalities.  I'd designed a "logo" for our wedding that featured a wood grain heart and arrow with our initials, and I added that to the bottom right corner.  For the RSVP card design, we decided on postcards.  This saved money and created less waste.  We also wanted to forgo a formal, traditional reply and replace it with something more "us," so I came up with the idea to use thumbs up and down symbols instead.  The design on the front of the RSVP cards featured a vinyl record with our names as the album title, and our plans for the evening as the songs.

To create the invitations, we first printed them with archival inks on acid free matte photo paper (two per page).  We then cut them with a paper cutter, and used a corner rounder to give the corners a nice finished look.  For the backing, we chose a beautiful yellow cardstock from Paper Source.  We rounded the corners on the cardstock, then used permanent double-sided scrapbook tape to adhere the printed invitations to the backing.  For the RSVP cards, we printed them on gray cardstock (also from Paper Source), double sided, four per page.  We used the paper cutter to cut them out and slapped on some pretty postcard stamps.  To spruce up the packaging, we cut strips from kraft paper cardstock, wrapped them around the invitations and reply cards, then used double-side scrapbook tape to close the ends of the strips.

Finally, we inserted the finished invitations into A7 kraft paper envelopes, and attached clear return address labels that I'd designed with our "logo" and fonts that matched the invitations.  I hand-addressed each of them with a nice felt-tip art pen, added stamps, and off they went to our guests!  I may or may not have had several bad dreams that involved cardstock and jammed printers over the course of the project, but in the end, it was totally worth the time and effort to design and hand make our own invitations.  (*I also ended up designing and making the programs and menu cards, but we'll save that madness for another post.)


It's Monday!  Booooo.  Only five more days 'til the weekend.

PLEASE NOTE: Although we're happy to share our method for creating DIY wedding invites, the designs themselves were created to be one-of-kind. We spent a great deal of time brainstorming, sketching, and designing to come up with something that would be uniquely "us." Please feel free to be inspired by our designs and to use the same method for putting your invitations together. But we ask that you do not recreate exact copies of them. Like the other images and design work on this blog, they are copyright protected. Thank you for your understanding and respect of how special these are to us. :)