Envelope Liners. To diy or not to diy?

I think that lined envelopes look really cute for wedding invitations. They are a nice, simple way to jazz up plain, boring envelopes and can help you add your own personality to the invitations.

I really like the look of lined envelopes and I found this really easy tutorial from The Budget Savvy Bride, explaining how to make your own envelope liners.

I think that if I found some pretty wrapping paper in our wedding colours, I could make envelope liners for just a few pounds. My dilemma is that I'm not sure if it is worth all the time and effort.

Sure, they will look pretty, but it's not like anyone will open an unlined envelope and be horrified at the lack of pretty paper stuck to the inside! At the end of the day, the envelopes are going to get thrown in the bin. Do I want to spend hours cutting and sticking things that will just be thrown away as soon as they are opened?

I'm still undecided because even though I know they're going in the bin, I still think they look really nice! For just a few pounds, I'm tempted to make them anyway in the hope that at least one person will open the envelope and think "Ooh, that's cute!"

I think I'll try to find some purple and green patterned paper, or maybe just lime green? I have seen some other options for envelope liners that are also very cool -

Google map envelope liners

Map Envelope is a website that lets you put in your postcode and create an envelope liner made from a Google map. How cool would it be to have a map to your wedding venue lining the envelope?

If you don't want a google map, or the google map of your venue is really dull (like mine!) then you could draw your own map!

Or what about using a photograph? I think this is a little bit OTT to use a photo of the two of you (afterall, your guests know what you look like!) But it's still cute.

 

Another way to use photos as an envelope liner, without it being too cheesy and conceited, is to use someone elses wedding photo. Maybe your parents or grandparents, or someone special that you want to honour? 

One idea that I really like is to line the envelopes with paper covered in words. 

Source

You could have your names, wedding date and location, or you could have words like "love, trust, passion, friendship" etc repeated over and over again. The great thing about making your own envelope liners is that you could print out whatever you like and stick it in the envelope. 

Speaking of words - I found this recently:

Source

A nice wedding portrait, right? But if you look closely, the entire picture is made up of words!

How cool is that? They are called Text-o-graphs and you can order them here in poster prints, canvas prints or digital file, using any picture and any words you like! I would love one of us, using our vows, or the lyrics to our first dance. 

At $40 for a digital file, $60 for the cheapest poster print and $230 for the cheapest mounted canvas print, they are not particularly budget friendly but they are very cool!

Invitation Mock Up

My invitation blanks and stamp arrived from ebay recently, so I had a quick go at making an invitation mock-up.

Now, keep in mind that this was a 2 minute job, with just a pair of scissors instead of a craft knife! Also, the piece of ribbon I used was not long enough to tie a big bow, like the actual invitations will have, but I didn't want to waste some more ribbon. AND the printer was having some sort of issue will yellow ink, so the insert is blue, but it will atually be green. Listing all that, I probably should have waited and done a proper mock up, but I was very excited and wanted to see what they looked like.

These pictures are just to give you a general idea of what the invitations will look like.

Front, closed

Front, open

Inside

Back

 

 

 

As you can see, we are trying to keep them nice and simple, partly because we don't want to spend hours sticking little fiddly bits on!

The card blanks were a little bit smaller than I meant to order (they onyl fit one flower per side instead of the 2 I planned on) but now that they are here, I actually prefer them smaller. It fits all the information in, at a good size so I don't see the need to have them bigger.

I am 90% sure that we will be using that insert (in green), but I do tend to change my mind quite regularly!

I heart ebay!

Seriously, what did we do before ebay was around? And how did anyone plan a wedding on a budget??

Today I have ebayed to my hearts content. The theme of my purchases? Inviations!

I have previously mentioned that my invitation inspiration was these lovelies:

but we are having flowers instead of hearts, and our ribbon will be purple.

So, from ebay, I've just bought 100 A6 linen textured, gatefold card blanks, in white, plus envelopes, for £11.50.

I was going to get 50, as we probably wont need more than that, but it was £10.99 for 50 so I figured I should get another 50 for 51p! It's good to have spares, and I can always pass the leftover ones to someone else.

Card blanks

So I have 100 of these from the seller Tubularowl1 and I also bought the flower shaped punch that will make the cut out shapes across the middle of the invitations:

It took me a while to find the craft punch, because I needed one with a long handle so that it would reach to the far edge of the invitation. I picked up a Carl Long Reach Craft Punch for £3.99.

My final ebay purchase of the day was a corner rounder. Ok, so this is not technically for the invitations - but it is for wedding related crafts, and I thought I might aswell buy everything at the same time.

I debated for a while about buying some gorgeous lime green, shimmery place cards, which were 50 for £4.99. But then I realised that I'd have to buy 2 lots, making it almost £10, when I could just as easily buy a couple of sheets of green card and cut them out myself.

I also thought that cutting them out myself would mean I could print the names off the computer, as opposed the hand writing them.I might have to buy a guillotine or something though, just to make all the cutting out easier.

So at the moment, my invitation spending is as follows:
card blanks: £11.50
craft punch: £3.99
ribbon: £7
card for inserts: £1.50

total: £23.99
cost per invitation = 24p

I really do heart ebay!

Free Invitation Download

Because I love anything involving the word "free"!

www.weddingchicks.com is a brilliant website for wedding porn and inspiration, but it also has loads of amazing freebies available to download.

My personal favourite is this bunting themed invitation suite -

How cute? You can personalise the colours and text to really make them your own style.

Click >here< to download.

You might also want to check out the Custom Goodies page of the website, which has a few other invitation suites, monograms and signs available to customise and download.

How do I word thee...?

When I posted the pictures of our invitation insert options in the previous post, I realsied that I don't like the wording I've used.

Currently it says

"Kayleigh and Karl would like to invite Joe and Jane to celebrate their love at a wedding ceremony"

Now obviously I mean we are inviting them to celebrate OUR love, but when I read it back to myself, it sounds like we are asking them to celebrate their own love. It sounds a little bit like we're having some sort of mass wedding, and while that could be fun, it's not what we're doing!

So it's back to the drawing board. How can we word the invitations? I hate the traditional "the honour of your company is requested..." and we want something informal and simple, but a bit nicer than "your invited to our wedding".

Ideally, the invitations should begin with our names, so they should read

"Kayleigh and Karl
would like to invite
Joe and Jane Bloggs
to...................................."

And that's where I'm stumped.

Is it ok to use "our" and "us" if we have our names above? For example, Kayleigh and Karl invite Joe and Jane to join us in celebrating our love..."

I know it's not grammatically correct, but does it sound weird? I hate invitations that are grammatically incorrect though! I'm not sure I could bear to send them out...


And yes, I am aware that I am stressing about something that people will hardly even notice!

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....