Wedding Wednesday: Operation Invitation Take 2

A couple weeks ago we gave you a super quick sneak peak at our wedding invitations as we were madly assembling them.  I mean, we were in and out of there so fast it was like the Flash over here at Angie’s Roost.  But we’re back today with a more in depth look at those invites now that (fingers crossed) everyone should have them in hand.  We had a few returned to us but hopefully round two has arrived safely.  I am now pleased to introduce for the first time, Mr. & Mrs. wedding invitation suite:

And when it’s all assembled up it looks a little something like this.

I couldn’t decide on a backdrop for photographing the invitations.  I used the floor in the entryway for a round and the table runner fabric for another round.  I’m impartial, neutral, just call me Switzerland, I like both backdrops.

Okay, so now that the initial shock of the amazingness that is our wedding invitation suite wears off, let’s get down to brass tax, shall we?!  There’s a definite theme going on here.  I like to call it “rustic farmhouse chic”.  How’s that for a new wedding theme?!  And actually, a more suiting theme for our wedding is “Party ’til the cows come home.”  We even worked it into the invites but you’ll have to wait a bit for that one.  With the theme in mind, armed with my Photoshop skills, I crafted up our invite.

Complete with a cow stamp, burlap textured band, and a navy colored Photoshoped barn.  And speaking of that Photoshoped barn, anybody recognized it?

Seriously, anybody?  I’ll give the first person to figure it out $20.  Actually…no I won’t, I’m wedding broke.  It’s a photo of our reception venue, Morgan Hill Event Center, that I stole from their website and applied a few Photoshop effects to make it fit our invitation theme.  Clever, huh?!  With the invitation designed, I moved on the RSVP cards.

I used the same theme as the invitation and incorporated a Photoshopped version of a white picket fence.

The RSVP card is double sided with the fence on one side and an actual, fill-in the blank RSVP on the back.  And of course, the fun-loving “party ’til the cows come home” couple that we are, we had a little fun by adding some mad libs to the declining part of the RSVP.

We had a minor screw up on the mad libs but luckily no one would know.  These were just place holder options.  We had meant to go back and change them up to be more fitting for our wedding than these ones, which we found on another invite that we found on Pinterest.  But somehow they never got changed during the editing process.  Ooops.  But they work.

Then there’s the RSVP envelope.

We went with a “paper bag” style envelope for both the RSVP envelope and also for the invitation envelope for consistency’s sake.  As for our address stamp, it was one we had ordered from Save The Date Design on Etsy.  It performed double duty as the address on the RSVP envelopes and also the return address on our larger invitation envelopes.  AND it’s coming in handy for thank you notes.  And did you notice the stamp on the envelopes?

Just days before mailing our invitations I stumbled across these weathervane stamps on the USPS website.  They were perfect!  Although some invites got sent out with a king and queen of hearts stamp, our original stamp of choice.  But I didn’t order enough king & queen of hearts stamps because I had only factored in needing one stamp per invitation not two, thus meaning I had to order more.  But I loved the weathervane stamps so much!  They just fit our wedding theme so perfectly so I nixed the royalty in lieu of weathervanes!

The next piece of the invitation is the combo, itinerary/lodging card.

Again, I worked the consistent theme combined with our wedding colors (navy and yellow).  If I were to publish “Design Rules According To Angie” the number one rule would definitely be consistency.  So to any of you out there trying to create your own wedding invitations, think consistently.  Use a maximum of two fonts (but you can switch up the size, boldness, etc.), keep colors similar or harmonious, and repeat, repeat, repeat to send a consistent message and theme.  Who knew my marketing and design background would come in handy for wedding planning?!

Another card in the invitation suite is the registry card.

Again, it’s consistent within the theme of the invitations but yet very different.  And then finally, my favorite part of the invitation, the medallion and baker’s twine that holds the whole thing together.

Note the theme “Party ‘Til The Cows Come Home”.  This is going to be a fun wedding.  Just saying!

The design part for the invitations was super easy, at least for me.  I knew exactly what I wanted to do, spent a little time to play around with sizes to make sure everything fit in the envelopes I had purchased, and fine tuned colors a little bit.  The tricky part was printing and cutting the invitations.  We printed every single invite on our home printer in VERY small batches so as not to overload it.  And we used a watercolor paper from the craft store to give it a fancier feel on the cheap.  Then we cut out each piece…with scissors…individually.  We don’t have a paper cutter, I almost wish we had purchased one, but scissors worked just fine minus the time consuming part.  After everything was cut out, we spent an evening assembling them and mailed them out the next day.

Okay, now how about a little budget breakdown, and this is for a total of 100 invites of which we sent out 96 leaving 4 for keepsakes.

• Address stamp – $27.95 (before shipping)
• Baker’s twine – $14.00 (before shipping)
• Envelopes – $82.50 (including shipping)
• Watercolor paper – $62.00 (that was buying it one package at a time from AC Moore with a 40% or 50% off coupon each time)
• Stamps – $126.00
• Grand total $312.45

Not terribly cheap but considering if we had purchased those invites from a printer or Etsy shop, it would have cost us well over $1,400 and that’s not even including the stamps!  They were alot of work to make and put together but totally worth it!  I love our invites to death and I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out.

Pssst…Been there brides and brides to be, tell me about your wedding invites.  Did you purchase them from a printer or make your own?  Did you go with a theme?  And seriously…aren’t mailing cost ridiculous?!  I can’t believe stamps ended up being more expensive than the materials to make our invites! Crazy town!