Wedding Recap: Invitations

I had been wanting to recap some parts of our wedding/planning process and I saw a post on a forum asking for wedding invitation inspiration, so I thought I'd finally post ours. We made these ourselves. Even the pocketfolds; it took forever. Start early if you're going to do this!!! We ordered cardstock in bulk from The Paper Mill Store. They have these wedding paper sample packs with different 'themes', which was really nice because we had pretty specific blues in mind that we were looking for. We ordered their Winter pack; it cost $5 for the sample and we got a coupon for $5 off our order, so it ended up being free. And I got a few pieces of pretty cardstock :) We ordered matching envelopes (the same brand as our navy cardstock) from envelopemall. We made square invitations, which increases the postage by quite a bit. With the extra weight, they ended up costing 79 cents each to mail. We ended up getting the 80 cent Mount McKinley stamps, which looked really nice against the navy envelopes and it had snow on it, which was perfect :) We did all our printing on a laser printer in Troy's work so we could print in navy ink without using a gazillion color cartridges.

This is the outside of our pocketfold. We bought the white snowflake ribbon in HUGE rolls (50 yards!) at Costco for really cheap. We ended up using the same ribbon to make pew bows (Troy's mom has a book about how to make big pretty ribbons) and for some bows on the Christmas tree Troy's mom decorated at the reception. The fonts we used were Champignon and Optimus Princeps, both were downloaded for free from somewhere (maybe dafont.com or something?)



This is the inside of the invitation fully assembled. That's my husband in the background :) We cut each of the pocketfolds to size from an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper, then cut down the pockets, scored them, and glued them. It was a pain.

A picture of our inserts all laid out while we were assembling the invitations. We wanted to alternate blue and white, but we had designed the invitations so all the inserts would print on one sheet of 8.5 by 11 inch piece of cardstock. So half ended up with blue in the front and half with white in the front. It worked out really well.

The other half of our inserts lined up for assembly with the rsvp envelopes ready to go.

The Directions insert.



I didn't take a picture of our map, but it was printed on the back of our Directions insert. Troy made this in Illustrator. He took images of Google Maps and traced over them. I thought these were AMAZING, I was so impressed!! He even put in the lighthouse and the submarine that's docked by our reception venue. Since we had a winter wedding, that's an iceberg floating out in Lake Michigan.The Accommodations insert.

The Reception insert.

The RSVP card. We never had an issue with needing this, but I've heard that it's smart to number each one on the back of it in pencil and keep track of who got what number in case someone forgets to write their name. I think that's more important if you go with the more tradition M.________; by actually writing out Names, people got the idea.

So there you go! I LOVED them and we got a ton of compliments from people. If you are thinking about making your own and want any more detailed info about ours, please don't hesitate to ask!!