Designing my invitations may have been the biggest headache and stress to date during my wedding planning. Mainly because I had a very hard time bringing my vision into reality and if I had unlimited funds I would have had someone else make me a custom suite. Alas the frugal part of me reigned my "But I want...." side in and I threw together these...
{excuse my terrible camera}I wanted to carry the Kraft paper theme over from the save the dates but decided to add a more 'romantic' touch so I decided to add the doilies, which I took from this inspiration photo from a Style Me Pretty Real Wedding post
{source}***On a side note, doilies from Michaels are the heavy duty ones for baking which have extra lining on them to prevent grease to seep through the paper…NOT what I wanted and had to return. The Bulk Barn's selection was the same as Michaels but when I went to Party Stuff I found packs of 25 for $1.00 so I was very happy, even if it took me a while to track them down. Would I do doilies again? Nope! I think they are pretty but they are extremely time consuming to glue onto the paper as the glue stick didn't run smoothly across the back of the doily nor could I put the glue onto the Kraft paper and put the doily on it as the paper is slightly raised around the tiny cut out portions. They looked okay when I was finally done 5 hours later but I saw a few at friends and family's house later and the doilies were pulling off the paper. Not thrilled but everyone said they thought they were nice so I suppose I should stop being such a Negative Nelly about it.***
As for the fonts, I downloaded the free font Scriptina, which you can find on sites like dafont.com, for our names on the invitation and the titles of the Directions & RSVP cards, and just used a stock font that comes with Microsoft Office for the rest of the text called Californian FB. As beautiful as Scriptina is I did have to do a little fiddling with the placement of the letters as some of them wanted to put too much of a space between each other making them look like I didn't know how to type, specifically e, t, & g. And the spacing between lines looked little I hit triple space, see…
Because I designed everything in Microsoft Word (I was too cheap to buy Adobe Illustrator, although I would love to have their Creative Suite….), the way I moved the letters closer together was to type the words in Text Boxes and put the more difficult letters into their own text box.
(For purposes of this explanation I left the outline of the text boxes on as screen capture doesn't show that they are separate without it but don't forget to select 'No Outline' under Shape Outline in the Drawing Tools tab when formatting)
I then moved the boxes to layer on top of each other until it looked more like they flowed together.
For editing purposes and ease of moving them around the page, I selected all of the boxes at the same time, holding down the Ctrl key and then hitting the mouse's right click button, selected Group, this allows you to move everything together without having to reorganize. (The right click menu doesn't want to stay up when I try to print screen so I can't show it…sorry)
As for the wording, I wanted it to reflect the casual feel of our wedding so I went with the following… 
I also wanted to include a map but I put it off to long so I didn't have time to make one from scratch using one of the step – by – step instructional posts I've found on weddingbee, like this one from Mrs. Ballet Flat: http://www.weddingbee.com/2010/11/29/best-of-the-bee-making-your-own-map/ so I opted for using the map that the venue had posted on their blog and in Word just changed the color using the Picture Tools Color menu.
Rather than making another card to direct people to our website for more information on accommodations, travel and other stuff I just added it to the bottom of the map.
Lastly, the RSVP card…I didn't want to spend money on postage or wait for all of the responses to trickle in via mail so I opted to set up a RSVP page on our wedding website through mywedding.com but I still needed a card to direct them to the website. This is what I ended up printing…
(If I could do it again, I wouldn't put ___before each option as that confused a few people since they weren't actually meant to fill them out and I would have made the reply instructions larger as some people didn't know what to do at first glance…learn from my mistakes, right?)
When they went to the website to RSVP they would then get this page…
After filling out your contact information and whether you would be attending, they hit next. If they said they were attending they are brought to this page where they get to provide their guest's name(s) and each person meal preference.
Although online RSVP'ing works for most of our guest list, I did take into consideration the older generation, our grandmothers and a select few, who I printed mail back RSVPs for which I sent with a stamped self-addressed return envelope.
Once everything was printed and cut to size I bundled together the three cards with raffia and stuffed into envelopes I addressed by hand…no calligraphy though…just hand printed with a black sharpie.
And the end! See why I've been putting this off? Its ridiculously long and not that exciting. Stay tuned for my RSVP trials…
Newest follower, fellow manitoba bride (though not until next year) can't wait to catch up
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