DIY Wedding: The Invitations

I was never going to take on the responsibility of making our wedding invitations. However, I couldn't find any designs that I liked and the ones I did like were way out of my price range. I only needed 18 invitations and many companies require you to order at least 50 and that seemed like such a waste of money. I started looking into DIY designs and found this great video with a design that I really liked.

I headed to Michael's to get all of the supplies I needed. It was a little expensive because I needed to buy a paper cutter and scoreboard, but I have ended up using both of those items so much that it's more than made up for the initial cost. I also purchased several different colors of card stock, a tape runner, and envelopes. I spent about $70 to start my project.

After I got started, I realized that I needed a few other items like decorative scrapbook paper to line the RSVP cards and make a belly band, twine to tie around the invitation, a "tag" punch, and letter stamps and an inkpad. Again, I have used all of those items again and again so I look at it as a good investment. This was probably an additional $50.

I downloaded free fonts that I've decided to use throughout all of the paper products (found here & here). From there, I just decided the wording for the invitation and made it in Word. I also made the RSVP's and Additional Details cards in Word. Printing the envelopes was the most annoying part of the whole thing. The RSVP cards used an A1 envelope, which are incredibly difficult to find in the store. I finally found some at Michael's. I found the A9 envelopes at Hobby Lobby. 

Once I made all of my awesome invitations, I took them to the post office to figure out the postage. I'll just say it's a good thing I only had 18 invitations because they were $2.06 per invitation (about $50 total, including RSVP stamps)! One more thing, because of the belly band I added to the invitation, I was having trouble keeping the backs closed. I solved that problem by using Washi tape in a wedding theme (found at Michael's and Hobby Lobby). I was pretty excited by how that ended up looking!

So all in all, I spent about $170 on these invitations. I know I didn't save much money (if any at all) by doing them myself, but I did end up using many of the supplies in other projects, which you'll see in the other DIY projects I'll be sharing later on. Of all the invitations I liked, none would have been under $120 (I would have had to spend money on stamps either way) so I feel pretty good about the total cost of everything.

I've received some great feedback from the guests who all really liked the invitation design! I'd say this DIY project was a success!