Cheap do it yourself wedding invitations – 50 for $20!!

I couldn’t believe it either. In my opinion, invites are not *the* most important part of your day as the stationary shops want you to believe. They are an accessory that sets a style and theme for your wedding, an accessory that most people will throw away.

I wanted an invite that was pretty and went with our theme, but I did not want to spend hundreds of dollars. I *really* wanted an enclosure, as I knew I would have to put some additional details in our wedding. EBay to the rescue! I found this great invite on eBay for less than $20 for 50 invites & response cards – and it included a pretty band to enclose the invite and additional pieces!

When I got the set in the mail, I saw some things that are hard to tell in the picture on eBay. First, the band had an iridescent glitter that I hated. I also wasn’t a fan of the chintzey bow. After brainstorming ideas on how to achieve a more elegant look, I decided to flip the band inside out, having the glitter face inside and pretty design still show up outside. (Notice the header on my blog is a scan of the same design….very cool!)

Here is what it looks like:

It’s hard to tell but the enclosure band has an ivory printed design that is also on the border of the invite and the response cards.

I printed them on my computer which worked great. I found a pretty font I liked and used the free Wilton print Word templates to build my invite. Here is what it came out looking like, minus a few details we cut from the picture:

The outer band covers all the text and also encloses the additional information sheet (which is an 8.5″ x 11″ resume paper folded in half with print on both sides, also made with Word) that fit perfectly with the invite.

The response cards and envelopes have a similar look and are also tucked inside the band. Finally, I hand addressed the envelopes with my own calligraphy pen to give it an additional enhanced look and used see through printed labels for the return envelopes and return address labels.

Since I did the envelopes by hand, I messed up a few too many and ordered an additional kit from eBay. With all the additional paper and enclosures, I used the material to build our favors as well.

We decided to go with a CD of our favorite mostly romantic songs. We have a Lighscribe enabled DVD burner, which we used to make these neat scribed labels on the DVDs with our picture and playlist:

We got 50 of them for $35 online, and the Lightscribe template software is free. This takes awhile, as each DVD is about 15 – 20 minutes to burn. Then, we burned our playlist, including a custom greeting we recorded and added to to beginning thanking our guests for coming.  We created pretty enclosures using the invitation kit from above and cheap white CD envelope sleeves (we got 100 for under $10 online also).

As you can see here, I opted to keep the iridescent glitter on the outside to make the set more fun and I did use the chintzey ribbon here to add detail. We used the round gold labels that came with the embosser we bought previously here. Due to the glittery surface, we needed to use a little Elmers glue to keep the sticker on properly, but in the end they look great. We did need to trim parts of the enclosure, given they aren’t the same size as the  invitations, but it worked great. We’re going to use the remaining blank invites for placecards, which I will also write out myself.