Do-It-Yourself Invitations - Research & Etiquette

As stated in a previous post, wedding invitations should represent your best foot forward as the first impression to your guests. The invitation informs the guests of your colors, theme, the atmosphere of the event, and a glimpse into you and your future hubby's personalities.

That's a tall order for a little piece of paper.

But once you have found the perfect match, it's love at first sight. This is my inspiration (from Wedding Paper Divas):

Alas, a bride on a budget can find herself in a quandary. How does one get a fabulous invite and still stay within budget? If you have ever priced wedding invitations, then you will understand. Each pretty little invite can run upwards of $5.00, which doesn't sound so bad until you consider quantity. We have 105 parties to invite, plus a couple extra invitations for the keepsake box. Without postage, thank you notes, or programs, we were looking at over $500. Hmmm. Looks like a job for the D.I.Y. Bride!

I began by researching various wording and layout options for the invitations. If you Google, "wedding invitation etiquette," you will find a host of useful websites, including Wedding Invitation Etiquette, Real Simple, and, of course, Martha Stewart. My parents are divorced and both have remarried. Future Hubby's father passed away a very long time ago, and so only his mother's name would appear. We are paying for most of the wedding ourselves (we aren't spring chickens and both have steady jobs), but our families are contributing. All of this needs to be taken into consideration when wording the invitation. We finally decided on, "Together with their parents," as the host line. It works quite nicely. You may find this to be a good solution for your invitations, too.

Depending on who you ask (and wow, there is a lot of information out there!), most traditional opinions say you should spell out every word on the invite, including numbers. For example:

The first of January two thousand and nine
January 1, 2009
01 January 2009
01/01/2009
01. 01.09

five o'clock in the evening
half-past five o'clock in the evening
5:00 p.m.

But don't feel too constricted by tradition. Choose a style that fits the atmosphere of your event. We, for example, have decided to use numerals for our venue address and the date of our event. If yours is the church wedding with cathedral-length dress, you will most likely want to spell out the numbers.

Now that the wording was settled, I began researching patterns online. We found this lovely damask print online at Colour Lovers, where visitors can find and download tons of awesome, electronic color swatches and patterns. It's not the perfect pattern for us, but it's a start.

During my research, I discovered that nowadays many initiations are using a block, easy-to-read font called Copperplate, which I downloaded for free from Font Zone.

I wanted our names, however, to appear more formal, so I chose a traditional wedding script, Edwardian, from 2-Free.

Now that we have these decisions made, it's time to experiment in invitation design. Check back to read more about how we fumbled around with Photoshop and Illustrator before settling on PowerPoint and Excel to design our invitations and inserts.