We finally mailed out our invitations. A lot of people have asked me where we professionally got our invitations printed.  We actually opted out of using an official vendor and handmade each of them…(even though we did have the help of my good friend and the fiancee’s cousin, who in my opinion is better than most of the professionals out there).

It all started months ago when we first figured out our colors of blue and brown. We then found this wrapping paper at the Container Store:

Loving the damask pattern, Crystal taught me how to cut them out. I am not the most skilled person when it comes to scissors, but I managed to tackle the task.

The cutouts were then glued to brown portfolios that would hold all of our invitation goodies. We used something very similar to the one below, but ours were horizontal.

Then more cutting… we cut the opening of the folio to go along the same pattern of the damask pattern so it looked like one piece. Just imagine gluing the damask pattern to the flap and then cutting all the folio parts around it to make it look like the damask pattern is the flap sealing the folio.  A little hard to explain, but hopefully you got the idea.

The inside contents were also all designed by hand (again.. Kudos to my personal designer friend). The main invitation glued to the center looked like this.

The other details were placed in the folio pocket.

We then decided to seal the folio with a ribbon. So we punched holes in each of the folios, but realized that none of us knew how to tie a pretty bow. Therefore, we decided just to tie it in a knot, but knew that it wouldn’t look as pretty.  What to do? What to do? We had ordered the square printouts of our logo below for our programs.

Since we some how got double the order, we decided to cut each logo out and use them to put the ribbon through. Yes… a lot of cutting was involved in the making of these little suckers!  We punched holes at the top of the cutouts, put the ribbon through, tied a knot and voila our sealed invites.

We also lined our own envelopes which involved more cutting and more gluing…but the boring details behind that don’t have to be shared.

And there you have it…the play-by-play on how we made our invitations.  Now on to our wedding programs!