And they're off!!

Our invitations are FINALLY outta here!! It is a great feeling, and I am very excited about it!!

Wanna hear about them?? Well, here it goes...

So last summer, trying to be a good soon-to-be-bride (who would be attending school again in the fall) I attempted to get as much done as I could before summer ended! And so, impulsively (wait, me?? Impulsive? NO WAY?!?) I purchased wedding invitations at Joanne's with a coupon. Now, we got quite the deal: all 150 invites for less than $60, with EVERYTHING included! We just had to print them ourselves... boy was I impressed with myself and this purchase....


Now here comes March when we were needing to work on these invites... so I pull them out... (I HAD looked at them since the previous summer, I just hadn't really thought about them much) and I cant stand them. I know, who really cares, right?? Wrong. I had been really good this whole time with saving money left and right (except for our save the dates (from here) see below, which I was allowed because the already purchased invites were so cheap... oops...)


Therefore, after whining a bit too much to friends and family, my mom gave the green light to "exploring my options" :] What a nice nice mother! So, I took off... and found... nothing! For a really long time. I just hate all of the bows and plainness and boarders and yuck.

Until.... I found this! This amazing woman made these wedding invites for a client, and the color was probably what initially caught my eye. I LOVE yellow! And I learned how to sew a few months ago from this lovely lady, so I felt like I could tackle these! And the best part was, I could use a lot of the materials (i.e., cream cardstock, envelopes) I already had from the kit from Joanne's! AND it just so happened that I had purchased this fabric:

about a month prior to make "a purse or something" out of because it just happened to have grey and yellow in it, and so I went to work immediately calling all Joanne's in Washington trying to round up more of it... I will not go into detail on how hard it was to figure out how to locate fabric when all you really can do is either describe what you have or read off literally 20+ receipts until the right one comes up. Well, I ended up finding a few more yards in Kent. So my dear father drove out one afternoon and purchased it on clearance for me for a whopping $20.

So then I got to work cutting out the flowers... and with a few almost blisters later, I had a huge stack of cut-out flowers and leaves!

Next, to quickly skim over a few details:

1. We searched for wording, and eventually combined like 5 different sample invites into the "perfect for us" wording that we used

2. I searched with lovely helpers all around for yellow paper to back the cardstock with... and this was not easy. You would be surprised how many yucky yellows (I know, hard concept to grasp!) there are out there! We needed one that would look good with the fabric, but we didn't need it to match. So, my mom convinces me to go to Paper Zone (for the 3rd time) with her and vwala, there it was, outside of it's package to be sold individually: the perfect paper! It was only about $20. So, we purchased a TON and plan on using it for numerous other papery things for the wedding :)

3. We also bought dark grey cardstock at Paper Zone to print on for two card inserts: the wedding details and the reply postcard! Also, for very cheap.

4. We decided (for numerous reasons) not to back the invites with fabric, and just to leave the flowers as the fabric part.

So, after figuring out everything I needed and getting it all in one place I did what every smart DIY bride would do: I threw an invitation making party (with the persuasion and insistence of a few great friends)!! And boy was this a great idea!! I have some fabulous friends who were willing to help in any way they could and my goodness did they bust out those invites!! It was so amazing and I am still so thankful for all their help!!

So then came the "this shouldn't have taken so long but it did" hard part... rounding up the addresses (again), assembling the sets, and purchasing stamps. But, now they're done!! Yay, yay, yay!!

Well, here are some final products: