The Invitations: Part I- Lessons Learned

As I write this post, our invitations are on their merry way to our guests, anxiously waiting to be opened (or maybe that's just me that is anxious). In the mean time, I thought I would fill you in on our invitation deets:

I ordered the invitations and rsvp cards, and respective envelopes, from the White Aisle. Rebecca was really sweet and was super easy to work with. I'm extremely happy with the way they turned out. To save some $$, I decided to make the remaining enclosures... and this is where my problems began.

Lesson #1:
Originally, I had planned on drawing a cutesy map like one of these:

Laura Hooper

Pantomime Papers (aka Snappy)

This turned out to be a big fat fail and was not coming together the way I had originally hoped. Although I'm not really sure what my original hope was. I went into my invitations with little idea of what exactly I was trying to put together, it was very hard for me to come up with a design that really meshed. Finally, after many hours of trial and error, I designed a mini-map using a combination of Autocad and Photoshop. On a side note, I would like to add this: these two ladies are tremendously talented. Map making = lots of time consumed.

Lesson #2.
I had the mind set that, once I finally received my invitations, putting them together would be easy as pie. This was wrong. I think part of this stems from the fact that I didn't really want to put that much effort into the invitations in the first place. In the beginning, I really didn't see the importance of spending lots of $$ and time on something that people would most likely discard. However, once I received my big box of invitations and rsvp cards, they seemed too neatly packed to just stuff in an envelope and send. (I may have also felt to live up to since my paper was going to be streamed live on the Internet). Thus, a vision was created and molded. Something that took a long while to perfect.

Lesson #3
The assembly process was extremely unorganized. Because I had taken so much time designing a map and a vision, I was rushed to get these puppies out the door. In fact, most of my Labor Day weekend was spent assembling them. Instead of pre-cutting all my supplies, I intermixed cutting and matting and stuffing- making the process much longer than it should have been. I also underestimated the amount of supplies I needed, which meant I had to take several breaks from the assembly process to get more.

And so, after many trips to Joanns and Hobby Lobby, hours of cutting and matting, an entire Friday spent addressing, my invitations were born. Stay tuned for later this week/early next week for the final result!

What lessons have you learned from your DIY projects?