wedding flashback: save the dates & invitations...

Happy May 1st everyone!  May is a special month for me because it is the month of my wedding anniversary. Therefore, I thought this month would be the perfect time to share some photos and DIY projects from our wedding.  I thought I would kick it off with our "save the date" cards and invitations.

My husband and I picked Santa Barbara for our wedding location not only because of its beauty and charm, but also because it was a great vacation spot for our of town guests and within a reasonable driving distance for our Los Angeles friends and family.  After visiting a few reception locations, we visited the Four Seasons Biltmore on a whim and fell in love with the location.  The grounds, architecture, and feel were everything I could have ever wanted for this special day.  

After we locked down the date and booked the location, I simply asked the hotel's event coordinator if we could have some of the complimentary postcards that are in the guest rooms.  I then printed our wedding information on the back of the postcard and added a postmark stamp to the top right corner to make it look like a used postcard.  All in all, the save the date cards cost me about $15 ($5 for the stamp and $10 for envelopes).

After making our save the date cards, I figured I would take a stab at making our wedding invitations as well.  By this time, I had picked an ocean blue as our primary wedding color.  When I saw this decorative paper at Paper Source, it matched perfectly with our wedding colors and I knew I wanted to incorporate it somehow into our wedding invitations.  The paper is "Yuzen Pool Lake Waves" and is about $8 for one 25" x 19" sheet.

For the outside of the invitation, I bought blank 5 1/2" square folded cards from Paper Source in their "Lake" color.  I cut the decorative paper into strips and glued it on the front of the folded card with a glue stick and then added blue and cream ribbon for extra decoration.

For the RSVP cards on the inside of the invitation, I used Paper Source's 4 bar note cards and envelopes in cream and fastened them down to the folded card using more ribbon.  I printed the invitation on Paper Source's 5" enclosure cards and fastened to the folding card using photo mounting corners.

I don't have any pictures of the outside envelopes but basically used 5 3/4" envelopes for the inner envelope and 6 1/2" envelopes for the outer envelope.  I simply printed the names and addresses on the envelopes using similar font as the invitation.  All in all, the wedding invitations cost approximately $4 per invitation.

After the wedding, I framed the front and inside of our wedding invitations using Ikea's Ribba frame.  The frames are hanging in our home office.