Wedding Wednesday: Get In Lined

I would first like to start off this Wedding Wednesday post by announcing that our wedding save the dates are officially done, and should I remember, they will be sent out in the mail tomorrow.  Signed…sealed…delivered…I’m done!  And because I’m a sucker for dragging out projects (and procrastinating…can’t forget procrastinating) we’re going to cover all the craftiness that was involved in the making of our save the dates over the next couple of weeks, starting with tonight and the envelope.  So hold on to your hats and small children, you’re in for a wild ride.  Well…no…not really.  But it’s still pretty exciting.

Of course I couldn’t send out our save the dates in just a plain white envelope.  I had to jazz them up a bit.  And there are so many cool ways to do it.  What’s my poison?  Lined envelopes.  I’m a sucker for a quality, cute lined envelope and they’re all over Pinterest.  Go figure.  While I adore a lined envelope I wasn’t so crazy about the price tag attached to them.  Some were more “reasonable” at about $1.00 per envelope and others were up around $5-$6 per envelope!  Yikes!  Considering I needed about 100 of these envelopes, even the $1 per envelope price tag wasn’t going to cut it on our tight wedding budget.  So I splurged for a $5 box of plain white envelopes and a $6 roll of wrapping paper and crafted my own lined envelopes.  Oh, and a $1 for a glue stick.  Big spender!

I searched high and low for the perfect wrapping paper to use for this project.  I started looking for scrap book paper but that just wasn’t working out and then I switched up the search to wrapping paper.  About my seventh store into the search, and actually my second trip to Target, I finally found this textured, brown paper.  It felt rustic enough for our barn wedding and was unique enough for my tastes.  Sold.  Home I went with the wrapping paper tucked under my arm for an afternoon/evening of envelope lining.  Here’s how the play by play goes.  First up, I had to make a template.  To do this I opened the envelope flap and traced the entire envelope onto a piece of card stock.

Then cut out the template:

And trimmed it up until it fit perfectly into the envelope and was just a smidge shorter than the envelope (you know…so you don’t cover up the lickie part):

Then I traced the template onto the wrapping paper and cut it out:

I used a glue stick to glue the back of the liner, concentrating solely on the triangular area (the bottom, square area of the liner didn’t need any glue since it would be tucked into the envelope and anchored by the glue in the triangular area):

Then slid the liner into the envelope, lined it up as I desired, and pressed down on the liner to secure it to the envelope (note…I later found it much easier to tuck the liner into the envelope first, then peel back the top part and apply the glue directly to the envelope…much easier):

And voila…a perfectly cute lined envelope DIY style and at a fraction of the cost it would have been to buy them.  Plus, I have tons of wrapping paper left over (hmmmm…just might have to do this again for our invitations).

I love how adorable our save the date cards look with the envelope.  Here’s a sneak peek:

It took us (yes us…Colby helped…although he did say “I’ll divorce you if you tell anyone about this” but I took his threat lightly…obviously) a solid evening to finish up these suckers but it’s time well wasted…scratch that…time well used to add a little extra character and love into our save the date paper trail.

So this concludes envelope lining 101 for this evening.  Did you learn anything?  Take notes?  I hope so because there’s going to be a pop quiz next week.  Kidding….kind of.

Pssst…Next week we’ll show you our DIY address labels and also show you our finished and assembled save the dates.  I’m going to try to “style” them like the ones you see on the Style Me Pretty blog.  Wish me luck!  I’m gonna need it.  I’ve never styled a photo shoot before.  Any pointers?