DIY Invitations Part Dos

I said the other day that my MOH was going to come up and help with part of the invitations. We had fun having a two hour jam session with putting the invitations together.

I promise, she was caught of guard in this picture. But you can tell from the one below that she was very focused on the task at hand. Which is why she was one of, if not the best, people to ask to help with this particular task. It helps too when you bribe people with snack-age while doing these tasks.

 

So we used photo mounting squares on the back of each invitation. We put one in each corner of the main invitation piece and then "mounted" to the pocketfold.

 These were great tools because it made the task go faster, smoother and allowed for us to readjust them easier if they weren't in the center of the pocketfold

 We cranked out all 140 pocketfolds in about two and half hours and then had some lunch. She offered to stay and stamp the outside of the pocketfolds but since I only had one stamp, I told her she was off the hook. I mentioned that I was still waiting for the RSVP envelopes to dry after a whole day. She is a smart lady and thought they might not dry due to the metallic coating. Her suggestion - aerosol hair spray  because it acts as a sealant but won't add a weird shiny coating like other things might..

So that afternoon I went to town and bought two cans of travel size hair spray from the dollar bins. I went through about 1 1/3 cans of spray but at last all the envelopes are dry. It just might be a little hard on people's tongues when they go to seal the envelopes. :(

Boom! RSVP envelopes were finally dry. When putting a seal like the spray on, make sure to do it in a well ventilated area or in your garage with the door slightly open. Additionally, do not panic when drops appear on the envelopes. I figured out that this was just the spray in a more concentrated area and it dried perfectly fine. My drying time in my freezing cold garage was about 15 minutes per invitation. I did them about 16 at a time on a table with a black garbage bag underneath them so I wasn't also coating the table in hair spray.

The next task was to stamp the front flap of the pocketfold. As you can see, the front is a bit dull to say the least. I jazzed it up a little bit with a stamp I found at my local Michael's or Joann's. I bought the stamp a long time ago and can't remember which one it came from but I believe both of them carry this one.

 

 I don't have any pictures of the actual stamping but this is what it looked like about 2/3rds of the way through.

When I was half way through stamping with the blue ink, I stopped. I contemplating changing to colored ink to the green that I had bought. I thought it might be nice to have some variance in the invitations with something so basic and non-essential.

After texting with my amazing MOH (who said no one would notice or really care) I changed the ink coloring. Before I knew it, the pocketfolds were done.

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Some good friends of our were asking the other day about our budget for the wedding. So I sent them an email going through our expenses, justifying why we went the money we did and what we cutting corners on. When I started talking about the invitation piece, I looked at Mr. Fiance and asked,

"How much time do you think I spent on the invitations? Including time designing them, ordering and this whole assembly process?"

"Hmmm.. Probably 20-40 hours. I'd tell them 30 but its likely 40. That's just the time I know about. It could easily be more because you are so detail oriented about it."

So, here's the debate we had originally about 3 months ago when we started talking invitations. Looking at websites online that allow you to put in your own information, change colors, etc. we found not too much we liked. Nothing really suited us and what we wanted. Additionally, with all the things we wanted to include it was going to run about $600 just to produce them and then postage. If you can't tell already we don't do cookie cutter or mass production very well.

When I found out who cheap it was to buy the things piece by piece, I took the information to my parents who are paying the majority of the wedding cost. To them it wasn't even a coin toss. DIY wedding invitations it was!

I've spent probably 40-50 hours on the invitations from start to finish. You can tell mine includes a lot of detail things that guests aren't likely to notice or care about, there are also lots of pieces to the invitation, and that time also includes the time to go pick out the pieces in the invite, and some of the travel time. If you do your own invitations, clearly you don't have to follow in my footsteps.

When you got married, what did you do for your invitations? Would you change anything? If you are in the process of planning your wedding, what are you thinking now?

There are a few other projects we have been working on. We? Yes, Mr. Fiance has been helping on projects too on his days off from work.  Posts to follow.