My Wedding Invitations (And a bunch of photos of them)

I had such a hard time finding our wedding invitations. I didn't know what I wanted originally, but I knew what I didn't want. I absolutely refused to order something simple. I didn't want anything that looked like it came in a package. For some people, that's okay. In fact, it's really traditional and the way most people go.

It just wasn't what I wanted.

For months I looked online, on Pinterest, anywhere I could for inspiration. And one night, around 4am, it hit me: I wanted plane tickets. Our wedding was a destination wedding for everyone but us. About 95% of the people we invited were traveling.

But what I wanted ... it didn't exist somewhere where I could just order. Thank goodness for Nicole at Glossie, the absolute best designer I've ever met. If you remember her, we featured her stationery designs in this post, and she also designed our logo. But, today, we're talking about our invitations.

It's not that she just designed one component. Oh no. She designed us a plane ticket for the major part of the invitation, a ticket jacket for the additional information, an RSVP card and rehearsal dinner invitation in the shape of luggage tags, and a map (because I decided I wanted a map instead of directions).

Nicole worked all hours of the night on these. Literally. Since I blog full time, I'm up working at crazy hours. So when I would take a break from working around 2am, I would shoot Nicole an email to ask her to change something.

Because that was me. I'm a pain in the neck client. I'll be honest about that.

See, in life, I always have a lot of ideas, but none ever go together. So I'm sorta very scatterbrained at the beginning. I was lucky that I was able to give Nicole a pretty solid idea at the start ... but then I wanted changes. Once I saw it coming together, it would help my ideas solidify and I'd ask her to change something.

From start to finish, I'm pretty sure it took a month. She sent me the files and I had them printed at OfficeMax.

I went to the store and was handed a closed box. The cashier told me I could open it to check and see that everything came out the way I wanted.

Honestly, I was scared to open it. The files looked great online but there was a chance they wouldn't meet my ridiculous expectations when I had them in my hand. And I wanted, no needed, them to be perfect.

I lifted the top and breathed a sigh of relief. They were perfect. Better than perfect. They were exactly what I had dreamed they would be.

That's when the real fun started.

I had 112 or so of each component printed on either 8x10 or 11x17 paper. The holders were one each on the large paper, there were two tickets per 8x10, and then the RSVP cards, maps, and rehearsal dinner invitations were four to a page on the smaller paper. What was awesome is that Nicole set up the files that way, so I didn't have to figure out anything before sending them to be printed. She also put cut lines on the file so I was able to figure out exactly where to cut once I had the pages.

And then I had to chop. And chop. And chop. It took me 12 hours total to cut the components with a paper trimmer. I split it into three sessions because there's no way that I could sit hunched over for half a day straight.

When I was finally done cutting (with only one casualty, believe it or not), it came time for me to decide about how much more intense I wanted to be.

I used a corner rounder, then sent my mom the photo above. I asked her what she thought was better: the one with rounded corners (which actually looks like an actual boarding pass) or if I could just leave the corners squared because it was easier.

She told me that if I could get the corners exact, I should round them. But if I couldn't be exact, I was going to make a mess of my invitations.

What she didn't know is I had a EK Corner Rounder (which is my favorite tool ever).

You stick the corner in and push down, and the corner is rounded and uniform every time. So that's what I went with. It took extra time, but it made the invitations look so much more professional. And that's what I needed. After having them professionally designed, I wasn't going to drop the ball on my execution.

And that's a good lesson about DIY. I always encourage people to only DIY what you can actually pull off. If you start to DIY something to save yourself money and you can't actually do it, you'll end up costing yourself money. And, my biggest rule of thumb was if I DIY'ed something, I didn't want it to actually look like I made it myself. Cutting corners on, well, cutting corners would have done just that.

The truth is, I didn't DIY these. I couldn't. I tried but the level they needed to be at far exceeded my skills on MS Paint and PicMonkey.com. I tried for a little while before realizing there was no way I could pull it off. So I didn't. I went with Glossie, and it is impossible for me to be happier with our finished invitations.

(Small aside: I know there are parts of the invitations that look blurry and imperfect. That's where I blurred out our last names and other information. There aren't any imperfections on the actual invitations.)

BRIDAL BABBLE: What's a DIY project you decided to scrap?