Ding dong, the witch is dead! Er, I mean, the invites are done.

Oh my lord. HALLELUJA. My invitations are doooooooonnnnne! I finally put them in the mail today and I can breathe a huge sigh of relief.

I read about people making their own invitations on other blogs, notably Weddingbee (so addictive, that site) but I can now tell you with absolute certainty that even if you read about other people’s whinging, whining and heartache surrounding their DIY wedding invitation project, you do not really know the pain until you do it yourself.

I’m hoping it’s like childbirth and the memory of the pain will erase itself once the reality of my beautiful newborn – er, wedding invites – sets in. (Still waiting for that to happen. It feels too surreal at the moment.)

Here are some photos from the rest of the process (you can see pics from phase 1 here) and things that I’d wish I had known:

I was lucky enough to have the help of a great graphic designer that I work with. He kindly donated his time (”I’m a hopeless romantic… emphasis on the hopeless,” he says. Awwww!) and kept his comments about my annoying perfectionist tendencies to himself, which is amazing. Even I know I can get annoying.

Tip #1: To expedite the design process when working with a designer, do your homework.

Thank goodness I had a very clear vision of what I wanted, i.e. not just what text I wanted on it, but also the graphic, the colors, and the fonts (Optimus Princeps and… I’m blanking on the name of the scripty one but I’ll find it). Knowing what you want is probably the number one toughest part of making your own invites but if you can figure it out down to the last detail, the designing process will be much easier. Well, either that, or you have to be a non-controlling obsessive bride who trusts her graphic designer with her life.

Printing them was relatively painless, in fact, arguably the easiest part of the entire project. I was lucky enough to have access to a laser printer at work so I did it there. I had to feed the cardstock in sheet by sheet (50 pieces) but hey, can’t complain – it was free.

I then had to cut those again… more adventures with X-Acto blades. God I hate those things now. At least we (read: the fiance) learned our lesson from the cutting the first stacks of dark and light purple cardstock, so we did them one by one. Tedious, but STRAIGHT.

I had originally planned on making the back of the invitations interesting too by putting a 1.5″ ribbon on it (which wouldn’t show on the front as it would be tucked behind one of the layers – you can see a bit of it peeking out in the invite on the left). In my head I had a vision of our initials on the ribbon so I got the designer to make me a page of cute logo-ized initials, reversed so I could print them on iron-transfer paper. Neat idea, right? Unfortunately, it didn’t come out quite like my vision. Rather than just the initals on the ribbon, the clear plasticky background got ironed on too, so it looked like a big piece of tape stuck on the ribbon. Gross. Sadly, I don’t have a picture of this step. Needless to say, I ditched the big ribbon idea.

Tip #2 – Before you waste time designing things you should really try it out first to make sure it works. Sounds simple, I know, but you’d be surprised how your brain doesn’t work sometimes.

Then came the big gluing day. I opted for spray glue which was the right thing to do I think – much faster and less opportunity for lumpy invitations. I originally set up our mini-factory on the patio but it was a bit chilly. So, the fiance flexed his MacGuyver skills and set us up in a spare bedroom by the open window and with a fan pointed at us from behind to push the glue fumes out.

Tip #3 – When using spray glue, make sure there’s good ventilation. Doing it indoors IS possible though… just make sure you’re by an open window and close the door behind you so the smell gets pulled in one direction only.

Note: there will inevitably be some gluey clouds landing in places other than your paper – for instance, on your fiance’s arm hairs. (Ha ha ha ha ha..! Sweet revenge for the paper cutting episode!) While the fiance sprayed the glue, I positioned the paper as best I could.

Tip #4 – to avoid going absolutely INSANE, remember that these are hand-made invitations and if you expect them to come out PERFECTLY like factory-made ones, you are delusional. Just kidding, you hopefully aren’t delusional. But save yourself lots of anxiety and “let go” of the perfectionism just a bit. I found breathing deeply helped. Plus, as the fiance told me time and time again, no one will notice they’re 2 millimeters off except for you.

One of the most disappointing parts of the process was the printing of the little travel info cards. Since we’re having a destination wedding, we had to include the contact info for our travel agent with the invitations. There are a lot of styles out there that include funky pockets that let you slip this kind of info inside but since I was trying to keep the cost and effort to a minimum, we didn’t have pockets. I figured a small square card would be just as good, it didn’t have to be in a pocket.

When we were cutting the invitations, I had kept the scrap pieces of paper which I later decided would be perfect for the travel info cards. Well, the printer thought otherwise. It refused to accept paper that was so narrow, even after we fiddled with the settings for close to an hour. At last my brilliant fiance suggested taping the narrow strips of cardstock (about 4 inches wide) to a piece of white paper; I actually scoffed at the suggestion but then ate my words because it worked! It was a painstaking process, though. Then I had to cut them all. I was so glad when that part was over.

Then I got home and realized I had forgotten to include the ‘book by’ date on the cards. D’oh!!!!!!

Tip #5 – Proofread, proofread, proofread but don’t rely on just yourself. I proofread stuff all the time for my job so I thought hey, no problem! However, this DIY stuff makes you go nuts so get at least one other person to read it over!

I had to leave work early to make it to the scrapbooker supply store to buy 12 more sheets of purple paper. What a pain. Not to mention do all the printing and cutting again (at least this time the stupid printer accepted the paper size!)

And if that wasn’t traumatizing enough, next was printing the addresses onto the envelopes. Although I loved the iridescent envelopes I found at Scrapbookers Warehouse, I found it hard to justify paying $0.99 each for something that would inevitably end up in the garbage (I still delude myself in thinking people will keep the invitation, ha). I actually found pretty nice envelopes at Staples that were a very light speckled purply gray so went with those – they also had light blue, green and rose, in varying sizes.

We had collected and organized our guests addresses in an Excel spreadsheet so the mail merge in Word was supposed to be easy. And it might have been, if the printer hadn’t been so complicated. We had to try ten million different settings before we finally figured it out. But it sure beat handwriting them all, and it looked much more professional than my original idea of using clear labels.

I also had a moment of self doubt somewhere in there where I thought that maybe I should go with a ribbon after all – not, of course, with the ribbon I had already bought and lost the receipt for because that would be too easy, but with this lovely turquoise ribbon I had bought half a meter of at Fanny’s Fabrics three weeks earlier just to see if I could use it somehow. I would have had to make the fiance drive out all the way there to get more, not to mention how much more complicated the gluing process would become. In the end, I opted for sans ribbon as I felt the design was funky enough without it… much to the enormous relief of the fiance (who, I found out later, had prepped everyone I had asked advice for and pleaded for them to tell me the ribbon was dumb. What a sneak.).

So finally, I was done.

Well, except for putting the invites and cards in the envelopes, sealing them (with a sponge – as if I was licking all those) and putting stamps on them – all 93 of them (the rest will be hand-delivered). That part was easy-peasy compared to the rest, though.

Thank goodness THAT is over!!