Since my Health Nut Sister and her equally Health Nut Fiancee have 6 kids between them (they are the modern Brady Bunch), they are trying to plan a low budget wedding but still have a classy wedding. This means my sister and are doing most of the stuff ourselves, normally this would be a problem for the two of us as we are not the most crafty people. But thanks to Pinterest we have morphed in to a the Dynamic Crafting Duo. If you would like to see some of our inspirations for her wedding you can check out her wedding board here.
One of the first things we did was wedding invitations with only six weeks we had to get them out ASAP.After deciding on the invitation that we thought looked like something we could do, I created the basic design on Microsoft publisher. You would think it would be the easiest part and it mostly was, we just had a lot of discussion on the wording.
I thought it would be cute to have the kids announcing the marriage and inviting people to attend. Blending families isn't easy but this was a fun way to connect them. They also have a cute family quote they wanted to add: When you are a family you no longer work as a single unit, you are a team. You accomplish nothing alone but everything together.
I love that they created the motto together as a family.
The next step was deciding on what paper to use for all the elements of the invites. This was the easiest part of the whole process. We then printed off the invites and decided to mount them on cream paper to make them "pop".
The next step was to mount their very cute engagement pictures on corresponding paper. Now these two things sound fairly simple and they are very easy. But they are incredibly time consuming, maybe not if you are creating a dozen or so invites but when you are doing 200, it took us hours...seriously hours. I cant even tell you how many hours this took. And it probably wouldn't have been bad if we had done a little at a time but our deadline was immediately. There was so much cutting and gluing and more cutting and more gluing...have I mentioned the gluing and cutting. My fingers were sticky for days.
After that we had to add the cute lace element and this is where we got smart, we noticed at our local mega store they have paper dollies so we bought 200 of them (luckily the store had that many) we cut them in half (yes more cutting) and glued (that's right more gluing) them on the back of the invite then folded them over.
Before I continue I would like to take a minute to thank my coworkers/friends and the ex-wife/friend they took time out of their lunch brake to help us cut, fold, glue and assemble the invitations (yes more cutting and gluing). They actually thought it was fun and enjoyed and helped us speed up the process. They even addressed envelopes and were nice enough to let my sister hand them the invitations for themselves.
I would also to thank my mom and The BF for helping to entertain my cute nieces while we spend one whole day cutting and gluing (have I mentioned all the cutting and gluing).
On to assembling the elements of the invite together, we added the engagement picture and the "in lieu of gift card" (they decided that since they are blending households they really don't need anything but if people are inclined they have one request, In lieu of gifts please help our blended family expand our home with gift cards to Home Depot.)
The last thing we did was tie everything with some twine. The end result is very cute, don't you think?
I would like to give one little word of caution if you decide to take on this project for yourself. The United States Post Office will make you pay extra postage for the invitations. They claim because of the twine, it made the invitations shaped odd and they can not run it through the machine and the stamp has to be hand cancelled hence the extra postage.
This whole process has taught me one thing...if I ever get married I will pay a lot of money to have someone else do my invitations.
This, of course, is one of several wedding projects we are working on...I will post more as they get completed in less than 3 weeks.
