DIY Invitations

One of my favorite DIY wedding projects has been the wedding invitations. You may remember a while back, I blogged about the letterpressing process of them. Now that the invitations have long been sent out and received, I wanted to show you some more pictures and write a little bit more about how I made these.

When I got first got engaged, my wedding invitations were probably the thing that I was most looking forward to designing. I knew that as the first piece of wedding-related stationery that our guests would be receiving, I wanted it to be a glimpse of our colors, our wedding style, and the overall mood for our wedding.

I decided that the image of a butterfly seemed fitting for our wedding because of its whimsical quality and because of its symbolism. It represented the long journey of our relationship - growing, incubating, and being transformed. Not only did we end up using the butterfly as a graphic element in many parts of our wedding stationery, we also made a logo out of our initials, "d" and "b" and added wings to the d and b to create a butterfly.

db butterfly

Here is the complete invitation suite:

Invitation, accommodations, and rsvp card

For the invitation card, I created an image of a butterfly using Adobe Illustrator and then filled in the wings with a pattern that I bought from istockphoto.com. I ended up using that same pattern in different ways for various parts of my wedding stationery, so it was well worth the investment!

Invitation with belly band and envelope

Rejoice, Relax, Respond

For the envelopes, I decided on a creamy yellow color. I wanted the dusty lavender color to appear somewhere on the envelopes as well, so I decided to line the yellow envelopes with lavender paper. To make the envelope liner, I took the same leaf pattern that I had purchased from istockphoto and tiled it several times to fill an entire sheet of paper. I then printed several hundred sheet of these, which were eventually cut to size and glued into each envelope by Billy and Dean!

After the envelopes were lined (it probably would have been wiser to do this before lining the envelopes), I ran each envelope through my printer so that a few butterflies would be on the cover of the envelope.

For the address labels, I bought sheets of labels (the full-sheeted ones that are not pre-cut) and created a template in Illustrator with the appropriately-sized labels for my envelopes. After these were printed out and chopped down to size, my lovely sister hand-addressed each envelope for me. :)

Front and back of envelope

For the accommodations card, I realized after letterpressing the front, I should probably include a map for our guests who are not from the area. The paper was too thick to feed through my printer, so I actually ended up printing out the map on a piece of vellum, and then I used an adhesive spray to mount all of the maps onto the backs of the accommodations card (I would not recommend this route...it created a pretty sticky mess!).

I made the map of Harvard using Adobe Illustrator. I found the area using Google maps, and then I took a screen print of the map. I then imported that map into Illustrator and then drew over the Google map to keep the lines on my map to scale. After that, I deleted the Google map and filled in all my lines. I created little icons for the church, Kirkland, the T-stop, and the parking garage.

Relax - with map on back

For our RSVP cards, I turned them into postcards by ordering a custom "Postcard" stamp from Office Depot. I stamped every card with the Postcard title and our address, and then drew lines to separate the spaces.

RSVP postcard

And here's how it all looked when it was put together (fronts and backs shown)!

The whole shebang!

Hope that gave you a little insight into the whole process of making our wedding invitations!

More wedding stationery posts to come...