DIY Save the Dates
We chose our wedding venue and date earlier this month and we are super stoked about it! I'm still trying to DIY and save money as much as possible since the wedding industry is bonkers (I already bought a secondhand dress from Poshmark and gave my hair its first trim since I did my last pixie cut pre-pandemic), and stationary was next up on the list. I had originally used Canva to design a save-the-date using one of the photos we took this past summer, but then decided something more handmade would feel more authentic.
This took a lot of troubleshooting with our new printer which does not like card stock (oh no!) and I started with some thick handmade watercolor paper that I had on hand, which ended up being more trouble than it was worth and literally too rough around the edges. But I settled on this amazingly soft handmade paper from Italy that my parents had gifted me from a trip for their 40th anniversary. It has a beautiful soft texture and grain, subtle deckled edges, and the way it absorbs ink is very luscious.
I drew the front of the venue with brown colored pencil, scanned it, and assembled it into a custom invitation design using a mixture of Google Drawings and Canva. Each piece was fed into the printer individually, and then I added a copper-colored embossed border for each using an embossing pen and rectangular stencil.
For the envelope, I had hoped to find something a little more of a burnt Sienna color at Paper Source, but settled on this persimmon color ($22.50 for 50; we are sending a total of 40 so decided to get some extra for inevitable mistakes). The maple leaf stamp is store-bought ($8.95) and I used embossing ink, a heat gun, and the same copper powder (which I already owned). Two books of stamps were a total of $23.20. Since I already owned the paper and some of the tools, in total that's $54.65 for our 40 save the dates. I still have a ton of the the Italian paper leftover for invitations, and a different type for place cards and such, so I imagine that will again come mostly down to the cost of envelopes and stamps.
There are some videos below from the assembly line!
