Invitation Drafts

I decided not to do overtime this weekend, partly because I was exhausted, but mostly because Isabela's been experiencing some separation anxiety and is coming down with a cold. Anyways, some free time at home (after a trip to Michael's), means I got to put together some drafts for the invitations.

Initially, I was waiting until I got InDesign from my brother, but the mail was not good to us, so I decided to make them in Word. Seriously. They turned out really well though. But I'll have to recreate it on InDesign anyways, because we want to make a version appropriate to email as an evite as well.

We also had a printer mishap. The awesome Epson all-in-one printer I've had throughout University, essentially died, after we spent $75 on ink. After spending most of the weekend trying to fix it (because I needed to print a 50% off coupon for Michaels), we decided to buy a new printer. So the invitation expenses are sort of going through the roof because of these things. In addition, remember how I mentioned in my last post using oneheartweddings for clipart? Well if you don't cancel your free trial, they automatically charge you $39US and subscribe you for a year. Take a guess how I figured that one out.

Anyways, despite those things, we decided to still go forward and DIY our invitations. We figured if we paid for invitations, we'd have to pay to get a matching RSVP card, and then programs, and other stationary.

Our expenses so far from just these drafts have been:

1. Around $30 for different decorative paper, the linen paper and 5x7 cuts of the chocolate and bronze paper, plus a rounded corner punch.
2. $39 for the wedding clipart website that I didn't really want to subscribe to.
3. $75 for ink for our old printer. (I'm going to put up the unopened packs up for sale on Kijiji)
4. $50 for a new printer.
5. $55 for a paper trimmer,  pearl embellishments, a square punch and ribbon.

For a total of $249. Booooo. Way too much before the actual invitations. Hopefully, we'll cut it back with selling the ink on Kijiji.

Anyways, we were trying to figure out a few things with these drafts:

• Chocolate or Bronze back layer
• Dark green leaf design or the outlined one
• a more ornamental decorative paper or the leaf design.

Good thing we tested everything, because we ended up choosing a different combination than we had initially thought we wanted. I won't say what we decided, so you'll just have to wait until I show the finished invites.

If you're wondering. I downloaded the fonts for free from DaFont. The main text is Day Roman, while our names are in Shit Happens. I also got the image from OneHeartWeddings.

I also wanted to do an RSVP card, that speaks to our website where people can respond to our invitation, as well as have access to other information. So I did a smaller card as well on the linen paper, using the same fonts and another image from the Oneheartweddings (gotta get my moneys worth!).

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Finally, to bring it all together, we needed a band to literally hold it all together. I had danced with a few ideas, but after requesting a DIY from pink loves chocolate, I got the idea of using a ribbon. Instead of a monogram,  I decided we could bring it together using a picture. Note, this ISN'T the picture we're going to use. I just took it 10 minutes before making our drafts, so I can see if it was seriously, super tacky or not. We'll probably do a nicer one in black and white or sepia, but Rodney does like the idea. Especially, since we'll be mailing the invitations to his family in the Philippines, who don't have many pictures of us and might really like it.

So theres a little bit of tweaking that needs to be done still, and a new family photo for our belly band. But, I think we got a good plan to make our DIY invitations. I'm really, super excited!!