Wedding Invitation DIY (Help Us Choose a Style!)

After my last wedding post, you guys gave amazing advice regarding the need (or lack thereof) to make programs.  I've decided that I'll leave these until last and only whip something up if I feel that I have the time.  They will be DIY and on recycled paper to save on any unnecessary expense... or footprint.

This paper (shown above) really caught my eye because it is recycled and plantable.  I figure guests who don't want to keep them (I assume this would include most people) could just drop them in their gardens to grow some herbs or wildflowers.

I'm thinking that our invitations will almost certainly be DIY.  We may have them printed professionally, but we'll want to choose and modify the style ourselves... And, as you know, with a house to renovate and big plans for our future savings, I simply can't justify exceeding our wedding budget.  Corey and I like things that are unique anyway and we don't mind spending a little effort to ensure that our wedding reflects our personalities.  We both love these pocket envelopes in metallic green.

Here's the same envelope in recycled paper, which we're also considering:

As for the actual style of the invitations, we have a couple of ideas we've been playing with on Photoshop.  

Many of you know that Corey and I met at our favourite camp and be both love nature and wanted to pull "nature" into our theme, while keeping the invitations simple and elegant.  

I'd love your thoughts on which of the following two three styles looks nicer.  Ignore the actual wording, since we haven't settled on that yet.

The first is meant to appear against a birch bark background:

And the second will be against plain white (maybe with an emerald border) with the odd letter or word accented with a forest background:

Here's the same invitation with a little border:

Aside from these two ideas, this version (below) caught my eye, and now I'm wondering if we should incorporate our theme colours a little more in the invitation style.

I know those who know me personally think I'm far too "Type-A" (I think that's a polite way of saying bossy, but I don't mind being called either.) to want advice... (Right Debbie?) But at this point, I don't know if I can think about wedding planning much more until closer to the summer, and by then we'll have already sent out our invitations so I actually wouldn't mind someone making the decision for me.  Note- I've prepped a few wedding posts to publish over the next few weeks while I'm super busy at work, so I promise there will not be radio silence for those of you following our progress. :)

We're having a pretty intimate wedding (mostly family and a few close friends) so we can get away with more casual invitations and probably won't even send save-the-dates.

You guys have been so helpful so far that I'm hoping you can solve my invitation woes.  So, which version (if any) do you guys like?  Have any of you seen or done anything really cool with your own invitations that you'd recommend?  I'm seriously considering having people RSVP by email to save on paper... what do you think?

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More Wedding Ideas

This is another wedding post.  So many of you were so excited for us the last time I wrote about our upcoming wedding, that I decided we would be sharing most of the details with you on our blog.  Even my mother visits the blog to catch up on our wedding plans, so we hope you enjoy the full disclosure. 

Also, a few of you asked if you could "copy" ideas.  Please rest assured, that most of these ideas are borrowed from others and I am not possessive of any of my own wedding ideas, so please feel free to take what you like! :)

It's been another busy week, which has left us very little time to work on our bathroom renovation.  It seems like we've been playing catch-up with our sleep and Corey and I have been working opposite hours.  It's seriously been one of those weeks where you basically collapse in bed at the end of the day without an ounce of energy to spare.  I honestly don't know how people with kids manage... I think parents must be superheroes!  The good news is that Monty has gone to his forever home and our house is back to normal again!

We have been devoting a little time to planning our wedding, since it is something we can do for a few minutes before bed.  Last time I posted about our wedding, we mentioned our colour palette of emerald and jade, and we found a couple of great inspiration photos on Martha Stewart Weddings (photos above and below)... As usual, Martha knows best!

I came across this pretty inspiration board for emerald weddings online, and while we probably won't use any of these ideas, it reassured me that this is a good choice for us!  I've posted some other ideas below.

I just love this simple DIY photo backdrop from Style Me Pretty.

 

In case you missed our glass cutting post, we're making individual glasses from wine bottles for our guests.

 

 

 

 

I adore this idea from Wedding Window and think we'll definitely have shot glasses of milk and mini cookies passed around to our guests at the end of the night.  What's better before bed than milk and cookies?

 

 

Since our ceremony and venue will be a few kilometers apart, we were thinking of printing cute maps to include in the invitations or to post on our wedding website.  I really liked the fun style of the maps by Merry Maps!  We could add personal landmarks and set a fun tone for the wedding!

 

 

 

I will never tire of beautiful vintage milk glass centrepieces planted with succulents.  I think they're so pretty and simple.  This photo is from Pinterest.

 

 

... And these are from Green Wedding Shoes.

 

 

This table from Silver and Jewelry is a little too rustic for our taste, but I love the eclectic style!

 

 

Do you like the idea of a providing a large frame as a photo prop for wedding guests?  I think we would choose something a little more ornate... and perhaps hang it from a tree so it's more stationary.  This inspiration photo is from Pinterest.

 

 

I doubt I'll have the time, but these fabric flowers from My Hand Made It are really sweet.  There's a tutorial for brides who are even more DIY ambitious than I am. 

 

We have known from the beginning that our camp themed wedding would have a candy buffet.  We're planning on calling it the "Tuck Shop" and including some of our favourite candies for our guests to help themselves.  This photo serves as our inspiration and we're already collecting large apothecary jars from thrift stores.

 

  

We're thinking of providing these sweet boxes to our guests so that they can take their candy home. 

 

 

 



 We're hoping to have our ceremony outdoors, and these personalized water bottle labels, featured on Wedding Window would make a nice touch.

 

 

I'm not sure if we'll need these, but I thought this printed itinerary from Etsy would be a cute way of helping people to understand our timeline.  It would probably be appreciated by our friends who have children and will want to know when we eat, how long the ceremony is, etc.

 

 

And on the paper front, we think we'll probably be printing our own invitations.  These pocket envelopes from Paper and More would allow us to neatly include RSVP cards, maps etc.

While we still have some oodles of planning to do, you may have noticed that I'm sounding more excited about it!  Now that we know how much we're going to need to spend, I have relaxed and now feel motivated to make our wedding as nice as possible on our budget.  I think this will be almost as fun as renovating our house... ALMOST!





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• Glass Cutting DIY

Glass Cutting DIY

You guys all know how much Corey and I love a good ol' practical DIY project, right?  Well, years ago, we ordered glasses made from wine bottles from Etsy.   Unlike the picture, each glass in our set is a different shade of green and we love that they are so unique.

When I posted ideas for our wedding recently, I loved the picture below.  This idea is brilliant!  Guests can just rinse out their glasses if they want to change drinks, but it saves us from having our catering staff run the dishwasher at our venue constantly just to keep up with demand.  It also saves us from renting a gazillion glasses and then paying for all the broken ones after the wedding.

It wasn't long before I combined the ideas in my mind and thought: Wouldn't it be even better if our guests could each take home their own glass?  Then, our theory came into play:  Why rent or buy something when you can just make it.  Seriously!  We could just collect bottles and make these cute little glasses that each person could take home! 

But how would we ever collect so many bottles?  Luckily, our friends are coming through for us... in a BIG way!  We mentioned the idea at a dinner party on the weekend and we left with boxes of bottles.  We also have a few other friends collecting bottles for us... We're probably already up to 75!

Of course, my mom had a practical thought.  She was concerned that people would put down their bottle glasses to dance and wouldn't be able to figure out which one was theirs...

Enter Martha Stewart craft supplies!  We found an acid that etches the glass for us.  You just paint it on and wash it off after fifteen minutes.  We thought we'd etch each glass with a guest's name.  Here's our test version:

 

Not bad, right?  We ordered a glass cutting kit from Amazon and tested it last night.  It was one of those rare evenings where neither of us had to work... so we thought we'd take advantage.

 

You begin by adjusting the bottles cutter to the height we wanted.  Then we scored each bottle, making sure to press firmly and evenly on the blade.

 

To actually break the bottles, we alternated pouring cold and boiling water along the seam.  We broke a few as we figured out the best technique but it actually made for a pretty fun evening and by the end, we were flying through them!

 

We still need to sand the edges and we'll etch the names closer to our event date.

We managed a big batch and even tested the etching again with our own names.


This is a large project... so for the next several months, if we're not working at our actual jobs or tackling a project around the house, we're going to try to squeeze in a few glasses every couple of weeks!  I also have a couple of girlfriends who have promised to help me with wedding DIY in December, which is when I'll probably do the bulk of our craft projects.  I'm sure they'll also help me empty some more bottles for this particular project. ;)

We love the idea of recycling and we think it's a fun take-home for our guests!  What do you think?





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