Since yesterday’s post about DIYing the wedding programs went a little long (much like the project itself!), the details portion of the event will be carried over into today.

On the docket: invitations, place cards, table numbers and more!

Hold onto your hats, folks. This stuff gets wild.

Continuing with the trend that I mentioned yesterday, I came across a picture of some invitations that I loved and decided that I must make them mine. I just searched my email for the picture and I found it, but I don’t remember where it came from. So if you’re reading this and you realized that I have pilfered your invite, please let me know and I will site you properly.

The look of the band holding the invite together and the little lighthouse on the front stole my heart and my mind was made up: come heck or high water, we would recreate those bad boys.

My mom and I went to a stationary store, got a quote for the most basic invitation that you could imagine and then promptly guffawed, pretended we had left our headlights on and bailed. It was highway robbery.

My friend Kathryn was also planning her wedding at the time, and she had used a website called Cards and Pockets (website here) so I decided to give them a shot. C&P is a specialty paper company that specializes in invitations. They have every kind of paper in every color with any jazzy embellishments that you could imagine. They will also print your invitation provided you supply them with a file that meets their specific requirements. After pricing it out, I realized that I could come pretty darn close to the invitation that I was imagining for a fraction of the price of a stationary store. And since C&P would be printing them for me, I didn’t have to worry about buying the supplies and then ruining everything by cramming it all into my home printer. They’re also really prompt with responses and they don’t even make fun of you when you ask nonsense questions about fonts and what, exactly, a JPEG file is.

I know that this sounds like I secretly work for them or something, but I don’t. They didn’t even pay me to write this. Actually, odds are good that they don’t even know about The Wily Hound.

I ended up just using Microsoft Word and Paint to put together the different parts of the invitation. Once the files were ready, I sent them off to C&P with instructions regarding the type and color of paper I was looking for and they just took it from there.

There were a few different pieces to the invites, so there was some assembly required once we got everything in the mail. There was a details card with information about the reception and accommodations, and an RSVP card that was slightly shorter than the details card – that way when they were stacked together, you could see the ‘title’ of each card. We ended up ordering the RSVP envelopes from C&P but we just printed them ourselves on our home printer and they came out great. Once all of the parts were ready, we laid the pieces on top of the invitation, folded up the 2 yellow sides of the pocketfold and slipped the band around the whole thing to hold it together.

I was really pleased with how they came out and it was great to know that there was a more affordable option out there that still yielded interesting, personalized invitations. And you don’t have to be completely tech savvy to tackle the project, though it may seem daunting at first.

The rest of the items on the ol’ DIY list are much more brief, don’t worry.

Next up: place cards!

For these guys, I went to Staples and picked up some basic perforated blank business card sheets. If I remember correctly, the sheet kit comes with instructions that tell you which Word template to use to synch it up with the cards so that everything prints out evenly. I put together the sand dollar logo in Microsoft Paint and then copied it into Word and then copied the names and table number from the guest list sheet that we had saved.

Once the info was all in there, we printed the sheets out, tore along the perforated line, punched a hole in the corner and tied it to a sand dollar with ribbon. The edges were nice and clean and they didn’t look like they had come from a sheet. We then filled a wooden tray with sand and stood the sand dollars up so that guests could find their names when they arrived to the reception.

Easy peasy!

The last DIY project that I’ll share is the table numbers.

last 3 pictures courtesy of Catharine Morris Photography

This was a pretty basic project. We ordered giant sand dollars from this website and picked up some number stencils and navy craft paint from Michaels craft store. My mom then stenciled the numbers onto the sand dollars and we propped them up on tiny easels that we picked up from The Christmas Tree Shop. We had ordered a few extra sand dollars in case some of them showed up broken (we had never heard of the website before so we decided it was better to be safe than sorry!) but they all showed up in great condition. It was a quick and inexpensive project and I love how they came out. The best kind of DIY!

Phew! I’m all DIY’d out. I anticipate tomorrow’s post being heavier on the pictures and lighter on the words…you’re welcome in advance.