To DIY or Not to DIY: Invitations

I've had several people ask about this and that from our wedding, soooo I decided to blog about a couple of the DIY things we made and DIDN'T make.

Anyone who has a Pinterest account, is engaged or knows someone who is engaged knows the term DIY all too well. And to be honest, I thought I would DIY 10x more than I actually did for my wedding. A DIY wedding is actually more time consuming and sometimes more expensive. I quickly realized that I realistically didn't have the time to DIY everything I wanted to. But I still wanted to be creative and to DIY some. I assessed a couple things:

• My abilities-- what could I handle on my own (realistically) and what did I have to leave up to a professional? For our wedding, I knew I could handle a lot of the paper/signage since I dabbled in a little graphic design. My graphic designer brother, Jeff would say otherwise haha!
• My time-- how much time was this going to take away from other more important projects? i.e. should I spend more than 2 days on my "dream" Mr. and Mrs. chair signs for one picture? This came to a conclusive "no". 
• My resources-- do I know someone who is really good at _______? For example, I knew my dad could build everything under the sun (he built my childhood home afterall), my mom could sew and I had some crafty friends who did have the time to focus on one specific thing.
• My priorities-- this guy is important. Is this something that you absolutely want to make a priority to try to do on your own? For me, my priority was to do the invites on our own. I wanted something totally unique and very "me". Who knows me better than me??

Invitations/ Save the Dates

Let me say this. Doing your own invitations is a LOT of work and very time consuming. I now know why they pay people the big bucks to have someone do it for them. If you don't understand what resolution, dpi, bleeds, kerning and have your measurements exactly right, you could have a big costly mess on your hands in quantities of 150! I had to do a lot of learning in order to make sure that everything came out right the first time. 

The Save the Dates were sort of my first "trial run" of do I really know what I'm doing and can I handle the invitations. After we got our engagement pictures taken in October, I went right to work on save the dates. The great thing about using your engagement pictures for the main focus of your save the dates is that it's a relatively simple paper good. Let the picture do the talking! Because I'm a marketing nerd, I really wanted the save the date to set the tone for what the wedding would look and feel like. I essentially branded our wedding. If you were a marketing major, you understand! The fonts and the "logo" I used were seen in many different aspects of the wedding. DIY-ing our save the dates was probably the cheapest thing I did. It only cost me about $25 bucks through Smartpress. 

Invites were a lot more labor intensive and ultra detailed. For example, your invitation card has to be slightly smaller than your envelope. Talk about tedious. And of course, I was going to be picky about everything. We had a soft, rustic and simple theme and I wanted this to come out in the invites! I did go with a little splurge on the pocketfolds. The thing that I loved about Paper and More is that they detail out every measurement you need to know. This was SUPER helpful!

Supplies:

- Pocketfolds in Recycled Kraft Brown (A7 Himalaya) from Paper and More Here
- Reply card envelopes (4 Bar size) from Paper and More Here
- Envelopes in Recycled Kraft Brown (A7 size) from Paper and More Here
- Twine in "Blossom" from The Twinery Here
- Large tag punch and scalloped edge punch from Michaels
- Custom stamp via Etsy
- Invitation, reply card, info card all from Smartpress

Here's how they turned out.

If you ask me, those would cost upwards of $600 if I had gone through a stationer. It probably cost me around $300, which wasn't really saving money in my books. I totally could've done invites way cheaper, BUT I loved them to death and they were a big priority for me. 

Stay tuned for centerpieces!

**All the lovely pictures are from my fabulous photographer, Katelyn James**