Homemade Invites

Our engagement party is a mini-wedding. We're planning on having 110 people, so it's definitely given me a lot practice for wedding planning.
I'm being very particular on details. I mean, our RSVP list is a spreadsheet on Google Drive so everyone who needs can have access to it. Plus, a little excel code in the form of =SUM(B2:B150) adds the rows for me so I have a really good grasp on headcount.

PS, Bridezilla says hi.

The snag that we hit is we ordered 10 engagement party invitations less than we needed. So, ten invites. What do we do?

I considered picked up a pack in the dollar store because, well, they'd be a dollar. And I can spare that. But a dollar here, a dollar there, and our wedding budget goes right out the window. Plus, dollar store invites are so impersonal -- and kinda, dare I say, cheap looking.

When you need something done, do it yourself, they say. So, I listened to the all-knowing they and I quickly put together an invite on MS Word. Well, MS Word Starter. My computer was so cheap, it didn't come with a real version of Word or the option of an upgrade. If I did, these would have come out a lot better since I did design on Word in a past life, but this time, I was really super limited.

No worries. I made a really simple invite, we printed it on cardstock we had laying around, and four on a page with a one-inch border meant they fit perfectly in the small envelopes we had lying around.

Done.


These are way more personalized than dollar store invites, plus, we didn't have to write them out. And since we had everything at home -- a computer program, ink, and paper -- they didn't cost me anything (I guess, okay, the cost of ink would be negligible, but I mean I didn't have to buy anything so no semantics please).

Are they the most professional looking invites? No. But they're also not ones that are ending up in my scrap book, so I'm okay with them.

(Let me interject here, in 2015. I've learned now about PicMonkey. It's a free photo editing software that you can use online. The stuff that I've been able to design there, like our wedding door hangers, puts his invitation to shame. If I could go back in time and redo these, I absolutely would. But with what I was working with and the skills I had, these are adorable. Good thing I learned about PicMonkey before the wedding, though.)

And in a pinch -- like, we forgot Aunt Edna's invite -- I can always just print an extra sheet. We don't have to reorder from a site like Minted. They're designed and done and saved until my computer crashes and wipes out my hard drive -- which would take my guest list down with it ... so it can't crash until at least November 24.

BRIDAL BABBLE: Would you ever design your own engagement party invitations?