DIY Invitations

Right from the start, we knew that making the invitations ourselves would save us some money. When I say 'ourselves', I actually mean 'myself' since my fiancé is the least patient person I know - there is no way he will sit and make 80 invitations!

Even though I plan to force my family and friends to help (I'm going to tempt them round to the house with rosé wine and cookie dough ice cream, then ambush them!) I still want the invitations to be quite simple to avoid any extra stress.

My idea is to buy some ready cut and folded, white gatefold cards from ebay then embelish them at home.

The original invitation that ours will be based on was this:

Gatefold, with hearts cut out of the front and a ribbon running all the way around, trying at the front.
But we will have purple ribbon and we're going to change the hearts to flowers. I've found a long handled flower stamp which should do the job nicely:

Nice and simple!

And then we will just print the inserts on our home computer and stick them in. I've been playing about for a while with the deisgn of the inserts, and I've got 4 that I like.

Option 1

Very simple, very plain. Maybe too plain?

Option 2

I basically found this design on another site, tweaked the colours a bit and changed the sizing/placement etc. I like it, but I'm not sure I like it enough...

Option 3

I think this is my favourite at the moment. I had to crop and re-arrange the background a bit to make it fit but I like that it's interesting but still simple.

Option 4

This was my favourite, but I dont think it will look right insite a gatefold invitation. If we were having flat invitations, this is exactly what I would go for though. Plus I spent ages in photoshop making the tree trunk long enough to fit the invitation!

I've chosen the fonts though. The purple one for our names is "Jellyka Love and Passion" and the other text is "Antipasto".  Option 4  uses "Fineliner script" but I think I prefer antipasto as it looks cleaner. All fotns are from dafont.com.

Decisions, decisions....