The Invintations

Admittedly, we have over a year until the invitations have to be mailed out but when you're doing everything yourself, the sooner you get things done, the better. I guess I started designing the invitations during this outing I went on with my future mother in law, Maria, near the beginning of the engagement. Maria and I went to the fabric store and Paper Zone. At Paper Zone, they have idea boards. On one was a three layer invitation; a background card stock, a medium color and the main paper. What a novel idea. I liked it. I picked out paper. Maria bought me samples. We even discussed size and looked at envelopes. After that outing, though, I left the invitations alone. I didn't need to worry about them for months, a year even.

Ok, so, we still don't have a budget (I promise this is relevant to the topic). In an attempt to figure out how much money we'd need for this wedding, I went out one Saturday and looked at the prices of things. I went to Cash and Carry to price dishes and food, Jo Ann to price fabric, ribbons, and brownie making things, and went to Paper Zone to price things for the invitations and the flowers (more on that later). I wandered around Paper Zone, notebook in hand, looking at the paper I had already picked out, envelopes and the like. It was then that I happened upon the square idea. I found square envelopes and thought “Hey, what a cool idea.” The next day I was reading iDIY, a do it yourselfer's wedding blog, and in a post, they had a link to a set of Photoshop brushes that really appealed to me and the style I wanted for the wedding. I then spent the rest of the afternoon downloading every font I found that also appealed to me.

The next weekend, armed with fonts, brushes, and new paper from Paper Zone, I set to work designing the invitations. With the help of my parents and little sister, I narrowed down the font choices from 30 to 3. By the end of the afternoon, I had a mockup of a 6.5”x6.5” invitation. The next day, I found out that a square envelope costs more in postage to send. I did the math, it would cost us around $10 more to send the square invites than rectangular ones. So now I've designed a 5”x8” invitation. It looks nice. This weekend, I'm going to print up a mockup just to make sure everyone likes the look, after another trip to Paper Zone of course.