Wedding Invitations - Part 1

What's a party without the people? Invitations are a key ingredient to any event and give the recipient their first taste of what they can expect from your gathering. They can contain a lot or a little information and vary greatly based on the type of event you are planning. Wedding invitations hold a variety of important information and are often expensive, so I decided to try my hand at creating our invitations myself. Our invitations consisted of 3 parts, the main invitation, a card with directions/accommodations and the RSVP card. In this post I'm going to focus on the main invitation card and envelope.

When finding and choosing supplies for all of my paper crafts, I immediately start with Paper Source. I absolutely adore this store and they have a large selection of colors, envelopes and pre-cut cards in a variety of sizes and shapes. Their prices aren't the cheapest, but they aren't outrageous and I find the quality and choices to be unmatched in my area. By purchasing everything at one store, you can make sure all the colors match each other exactly and everything fits in a corresponding envelope. I chose to use pool and eco white for all of the paper products and then use moss/chartreuse ink for some of the details.

Let's start with the envelope. I chose envelopes in Pool to fit a 5x7 invitation. I wanted to create envelope liners to give it an extra punch and I think it makes it that much more special. I chose a patterned paper I found at Paper Source that included pool and moss green.

On a side note, no longer are you forced to address your envelopes by hand or pay for expensive calligraphy. I simply printed each address on the envelope in the same swirly font we used on the invitations. It saved me time, money and still looked fabulous.

For the main invitation, we chose an eco white card over a 5x7 pool card backing. I designed the invitation information using two different fonts to be printed in black and pool ink. I used Souvenir font in black for the majority of the information so that it was easily legible and then I used Aquarelle font in aqua to highlight our names and the name of the venue. I designed it in Microsoft Word and printed it onto the eco white card on our home printer. I also wanted to include an additional design detail in moss green and chose to emboss this design on the left side of the invite.










Beaded Flourish Stamp from Impress


If you aren't familiar with embossing, essentially it raises the ink on the paper so there is an added texture. I will do a post on how to emboss as it's quite simple yet very impressive. Once the invites were embossed, I rounded their corners, attached them to the pool backing and rounded the corners of the backing as well. I find that rounding the corners on any card makes it more finished and professional. You can get a corner rounder from any local craft store (Michael's is my number one resource).

And here is the finished invite...

Photos by Kyle @ 918 Photo