Wedding and Invitations

My opinion on wedding invitations: If you have the money to flaunt the existence of your wedding in your budget then do it! If you’d rather spend your money on an open bar, real flowers, or better wedding favors than go for cheaper invitations. 

Truthfully, there aren’t many people that take a second look at your invitation unless it’s to double check the date or location of it. I’m not going to tell you that none of your guests will oogle over the expensive rhinestone you added or imposed edging or whatever. The old ladies that would never accept an invitation via email to a wedding will obsess over that little piece of paper. Personally, I would rather attend a wedding that had a better DJ or food and ambiance than one with a pretty invitation that I chucked after the wedding occurred and had a terrible night. 

That’s why I spent some time at Target, Office Max, Staples, and Michael’s trying to find an invitation that I could buy cheaply and make crafty additions to make it my own. 

My first goal was to find a printer friendly invitation that had a Tiffany Blue design that was elegant, but not overdone. It needed envelopes and RSVP cards. I bought two boxes $25 each with 50 invitations.

My mom works at an elementary school and has access to all of the fun die cuts. I wanted to add a starfish to the invitation so we cut 100 silver starfish. 

I used an x-acto knife to cut slots into the starfish and strung a black ribbon through it. I hot glued the ribbon so that it fit the invitation like a glove and all my guests needed to do was slide it down. Not only did the starfish add a nice touch but it kept the rsvp card and return envelope attached to it instead of having it roll around the envelope (I hope that makes sense). 

My mom copied the wording from her wedding invitation for ours. I loved being able to do that, it seemed so romantic to me. She found a print shop that printed all of our invitations, envelopes, rsvp cards, and return envelopes for $13. 

I bought a $3 calligraphy pen and did all of the addressing myself. It took forever, but it was fine.

I loved our invitations. It was obvious that I made them myself, but I took pride in that. So,

$50 for invitations

$13 for printing

$10 for ribbon

$100 for invitation and rsvp card postage stamps

$3 for calligraphy pen

=$176 total

Otherwise it would have been:

$3 per invitations (I sent around 80 if not more) $240 , add the printing costs unless included, and $100 postage, and a professional calligrapher would have cost me a fortune. 

I’ll keep posting wedding stuff as some of you requested. I will also update this post with more pictures (my scanner is being fickle).