Wedding Wednesday: Our Invitations + DIY envelope liners

Happy Wednesday!  I head to Chicago today for a quick work trip.  This is a headquarter visit for meetings for a project I'm leading on my team. I'll be back tomorrow night in time for book club at 8:30 and will manage to squeeze in dinner with my brother and his family tonight so it's going to be quite the efficient trip!

Now that our invitations are out, I'm ready to share them with all of you! When I first started to look for wedding invitations, I fell in love with this invitation on minted.com - but not the dollar price! They would have cost us $680!  I could not stomach spending that much on invitations but luckily my friend Amanda, who used to work in graphic design, said she could make some invitations using the minted.com ones as inspiration. Here is how they turned out (apologies for the crappy photo quality - I'm too lazy to take new pictures!)

We opted to use postcards for the RSVPs to save a bit of money on postage. I was also pleased to learn that our invitations weighed less than an ounce so we just had to use one forever stamp.  Phil's love language is saving money (ha!) so he was happy about this as well!

Since the theme of our wedding is books and reading, I decided to make envelope liners out of pages of a dictionary to tie in our theme. I did some research and discovered that Paper Source had an envelop liner kit. You can also buy envelope liners at Paper Source, but they cost $5.95/10 liners so they get expensive fast if you have a lot of envelopes (we sent out 120). The kit made them very cost effective as I just paid $13.50 for the envelope liner kit and $2 for a used dictionary at good will.

I can't believe I'm including a DIY project in this post as I'm the last person people come to for crafting ideas or advice...  but this project was so easy so I thought I'd share it with you!

First step:  use the clear plastic template to trace the envelope liner on the paper you'd like to use with a pencil (tip, make sure the paper is big enough!  I had to stop at a couple different goodwills to find a dictionary that was large enough for the A7 template!).

 

After that, cut it out and insert it into the envelope.

I used a glue stick to glue the liner to the envelop. It worked best to old the liner down and apply glue to the liner (versus applying glue to the envelop and pressing the liner to the envelop).

And voila!  Beautifully lined envelopes!

We received several compliments on how cute our invitations and book page-lined envelopes are.  So those compliments made it worth the extra work.  And all in all, it wasn't that time consuming of a project.  I made the first 40 on my own and then enlisted the help of a good friend to help with the other 90 (we made 130 total).

I am very lucky that I have a friend who has been able to do all of our paper products for the wedding. If you are ever looking for someone to do invitations or other paper products, I can put you in touch with her!  She's using my wedding stuff to build an Etsy shop so I'll eventually have a store to share.

I looooove our invitations so much, especially that scripted font, which we are using on other things like our rehearsal dinner invitations, signage at the wedding, the program, etc. It's such a dreamy and sophisticated font!