Beach Wedding Invitations

I'm I'm a do-it-yourself kind of girl, and our upcoming wedding provides plenty of opportunities for me to play Martha Stewart. In the past year since our engagement, I've been collecting ideas for destination wedding decor, guest gifts, etc. and I have so many fun things to do.

The first order of business was invitations. I ordered a number of invitation samples from websites and looked through many invitation sample books at a local print shop. Unfortunately, the wedding invitations within our budget were low quality, and the few I really liked would have easily cost us over $500 for only 50. Champagne taste on a beer budget.

So, using my amateur Adobe Photoshop Elements skills, I designed our beach wedding invitations, bought the materials and printed them all out myself. Here's how:

Custom Invitations

I like designing, so I spent hours figuring out the wording for the invitations, reponse cards, and the accomodations cards and went through many stock art images before coming up with the right look and feel. I went with a Coral Reef theme.

I then purchased a box of 52 blank invitations in Tiffany Bright White with a Pearl Deckle Border ($33) and matching response cards ($30) at a local paper supplier, plus a book of Shimmery, multi-colored cardstock from a craft store ($11), a bag of raffia to tie around each invitation ($3), and oversized envelopes ($33) to match the invitation lettering and accomodate the cardstock backing and raffia bows.

I invited some girlfriends over for an invitation making party, made some appetizers and Sangria using Prosecco and fruit, and within a couple of hours, the invitations were all together, stamped and ready to mail. (Thanks girls!)

Prior to mailing out invitations, we sent out save the date cards. I bought these "Boarding Passes to Jamaica" through Zazzle. We sent those out one year in advance, to give guests time to make travel plans.

So many more creative projects to share. Stay tuned!