These are PROTOTYPES. Yes, I know they look like crap. But I’m going to share anyway.
Here’s the first one I made:
All I had at the moment was a rubber band for the string. It would obviously be much classier than this.
It was inspired by this birthday card that Jessica made:
But I don’t have the patience to do more than one bunting string for ~200 invitations.
Here’s the inside:
So you can see the little bunting thing to the left. Then we’d print the map on the back of it.
The second one I mocked up very quickly, and then photoshopped some flowers on it.
First let’s address the elephant in the room that I don’t know how to make an ampersand. Stan informed me that it’s a backwards cursive “S”, not a forward one. Now I know!
That yellow piece of paper would be a yellow piece of fabric, and then I’d sew around that and the vellum paper (that clear paper). Yes, sew. I’ve seen lots of cute sewn cards and such, and with a machine I really don’t think it would be that hard. If I’m going to just print the cards, I kinda want to do something to kick it up a notch. Stan seems to think we can just hand-embellish them with gel pens. We’ll see how far we make it doing that.
I do kind of like the idea of not all of them being the same.
Oh and here it is in the too-big bright yellow envelope:
Yep, lots of yellow!
These might be too cutesy for a lot of you, but we’re really going for a casual vibe here and I like the handmade look. Plus, they will look a lot less “crafty” when we actually spend some time making them look good.
If you want to see some more of where I got my inspiration, check out my wedding board on Pinterest.
Oh and yes, it’s going to cost a lot less to DIY these babies. For 200 invitations, I’m looking at anywhere from $350-500 to order them. I’m not sure yet because I haven’t decided which ones to make and bought the materials and checked out printing costs, but I’m estimating that we can make these from $100-150. I’ll let you know!
March 31, 2011 at 11:35 am
This post made me feel lazy for just ordering ours. But I really liked our invitations. They were one of the plainest designs so didn’t cost a lot, but they were really pretty (I thought). I like the yellow design with the flower.
March 31, 2011 at 1:05 pm
I love them both! We kinda-DIY’d our invites (had an Etsy gal design them and we printed, assembled and snazz-i-fied them) and I can’t even imagine how much we would have paid a pro to do the same thing. Plus, there’s something really sweet about rallying all your peeps and creating thoughtful pieces of a wedding.
March 31, 2011 at 1:20 pm
Manda, I love the invitation with all the little flags on it! Hats off to you though cause I would do about twenty of those suckers before tossing the whole lot across the room. That’s going to take a lot of work! So. I have a friend (she just moved to Vegas) who owns her own party planning business which used to be exclusively weddings. She is the most creative girl I’ve ever met. She might be able to come up with something similar that wouldn’t take as much time.. or.. she has all the little scrap-booky tools and know-how to whip those things out FAST! Let me know if you want to talk to her 🙂 She’s totally easy going and loves to do it.
March 31, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Oh my god! I had no idea invitations could be so expensive! Can we vote? I vote for #1.
March 31, 2011 at 7:31 pm
Amanda – I like the yellow!! Plus, won’t you tear your hair out making all those little buntings?? ha
BTW – I worked out how much it cost for ours – and I think you will be shocked at the cost. Granted, I bought 100 pocketfolds for $72, so that was much of my cost – but it cost me over $190 to make under 100 invites! We actually only sent out 75, but I had to order 100 of everything because paperandmore.com sells in quantities of 50. BOO – but they had the best aqua color of all the ones I got samples from. Anyhow, shit is expensive. I can’t wait to see your final mock-up, you are awesome for making them. I really love getting handmade invites, they are so much more sweet than purchased ones!
April 1, 2011 at 8:07 am
And then the postage alone gets expensive. If you mail out 200 invites that’s $88 worth of 44 cent stamps. Ick. I’ve been getting those facebook group invites to weddings of people I barely know, and I wonder if they really plan to send invites to all their 500 facebook friends, plus family members not on facebook. Weirdos.
April 1, 2011 at 9:57 am
Yikes, I know. I actually spent over an hour in this huge paper store the other day (I’m running out of time to order samples online… that’s how I usually roll). I priced a ton of stuff, and I can definitely see how DIY could get MORE expensive than just ordering them. But if we keep it relatively simple, and hand draw a bunch of the stuff, it will end up being pretty cheap.
Also, we went to Kinko’s last night to check out pricing. 53 cents for color prints! Yikes. Looks like we’ll be drawing in the color ourselves, haha.
And yes, I see people doing that on facebook. I have no desire to go to anyone’s wedding that I basically invited myself to!
April 1, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Haha, that’s how I feel about it, too. It’s mostly the “give us your address if you want an invitation” wording they always use. I understand it’s a convenient way to get addresses, just narrow it down to the people you actually want there first. 🙂
April 1, 2011 at 8:51 am
The invites should say “Astanda” in order to represent your love & unity toward one another.
Also, I’m not too crazy about the used car sale flags, especially for that much work! but that just me. You should make then out of sheet metal, maybe stamp em ha that would be sweet. But complete opposite of your current yellow theme.
April 1, 2011 at 9:52 am
Thanks a lot Jonny, only you could ruin those cute buntings for me by referring to them as used car flags! Turd.
I do like your sheet metal idea but that sounds like a real PITA.
April 1, 2011 at 10:03 pm
The metal thing could be done, & I might-could punch out some shapes for you with the equipment at school, or,… oh you know what, I could use the laser to cut out some stencils & you could maybe spray paint your invites onto paper (or metal) (or anything really) or not.
April 1, 2011 at 9:53 am
PS Did anyone notice that I posted Wedding Wednesday on a Thursday? I totally didn’t even realize it until I was lying in bed last night. Sigh…..
April 1, 2011 at 11:17 am
Love it! I think the final product will look great!
April 1, 2011 at 10:01 pm
I noticed the Wedding Wednesday thing…but I figured it was a “this is my blog and I’ll do WHAT I want WHEN I want. Boom.” thing. You go girl.
April 3, 2011 at 11:16 am
I like the idea of #1, but I think you might make yourself insane making them.
I designed ours and then we printed them at home (I think the paper&envelopes came to maybe $50 max, and then I think my MIL insisted on buying the stamps for mailing them). The only downside was I tried to make postcards for our RSVPs and the recycled paper didn’t make it through the mail very well, so we just went “ummm, we MIGHT have xx people coming, let’s just plan for that food-wise”.
Maybe you could do a printed design with buntings? It wouldn’t be quite as cool, but you wouldn’t rip your hair out cutting and gluing/sewing all those.
April 3, 2011 at 12:10 pm
I hope this didn’t come across as me being really negative towards the idea of sewn invites! I love all the sewn ones on your Pinterest board, and I like the ideas behind your prototypes a lot.
Also, we ordered our paper&envelopes from envelopes.com. The prices were good and they shipped really quickly.
April 5, 2011 at 8:53 am
Cait, not at all! And even if you were being negative, I can handle it. 🙂
April 5, 2011 at 8:48 am
[…] bought all the supplies to make our invitations (so far we’re at $89, so I think it’s safe to say we’ll save some $$ even though […]