District Weddings

You might remember seeing Kerry’s fabulous save the dates. This time, her invites are wowing us – she continued her wedding “branding” within her means and produced an amazing DIY product!

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Creating our invitations was one of the things I was most looking forward to. And my fiancé Chris is a graphic designer, so he felt the same way!

With both of us working in a creative field, Chris and I knew from the beginning that we would create a “brand identity” for our wedding. We planned to use colors, fonts, and other treatments to give everything a polished, cohesive look. That began with our save-the-dates and wedding website, and continued with the rest of our wedding pieces.

Our wedding date is so unique, so we decided to use that as our theme. I wanted our invitation to make a bold statement and be a little out of the ordinary, but still with traditional wording. I’m really happy with the design he came up with. It’s bold but still elegant. The font he chose (Mona Lisa) was perfect.

Although I’m in love with the look of letterpress printing, it’s expensive—and we had a lot of invites to print! So I found a small printer online who handles any quantity, had excellent customer service, and whose printed pieces looked amazing. I can’t say enough good things about Cards and Pockets. We uploaded our design and they took care of the rest.

We bought thick black cardstock to serve as a backing to the invitations and applied them with spray adhesive. They were a great final touch and framed the invitation nicely.

Cards and Pockets printed our accommodations cards as well, which gave all the details on our block of hotel rooms for the wedding and also listed our wedding website.

To help keep our costs down, we opted for an RSVP postcard rather than a separate card and envelope. The envelope is one more piece to buy, plus it adds to the overall postage cost of each complete invitation package. We had our postcards printed very cheaply by Overnight Prints.

We wrapped a thin red satin ribbon as a belly band around each invitation suite. This keeps all of the pieces together when the recipient removes it from the envelope. At first, I wasn’t sure how to join the ribbon at the back in a clean, neat way. Then, at a craft store I found tiny rubber adhesive dots that would hardly be noticed between the two ends of ribbon.

I chose black A7 European Flap envelopes because of their nice big size. I got a tip to buy them from Envelope Mall and was so glad I did. They were much pricier other places. I love the vintage look of a long row of stamps on wedding envelopes. They make the envelope look like something really special is inside! It’s a special touch that’s easy and doesn’t cost anything extra.

Chris and I both thoroughly enjoyed the creative process behind our invitations. We viewed it almost like an art project we were doing together. It was the best feeling dropping off our finished invitations at the post office. Now we’re so excited to hear back from our guests!