(Ahh its Gaynor, our guest blogger and bride to be any day now, back with her news and showing us her beautiful hand made invites and sharing tips and fantastic stationery suppliers with us, so that you can make your own invites too – it sounds like a lot of work but definitely worth it!)

Hi everyone,
Since my last update at the beginning of January, where I listed our massive To Do list, we have been really busy ticking off as many of those items as we can off the list! Of course we also managed to add more things to it along the way, and hopefully most of those have also been ticked off!

The biggest task I completed {and hence my reason for the lack of posts lately} was completing and posting the invitations! I revealed them on my blog already(OurDaybyDesign) so to follow on from my previous post about our Save the date’s, I thought I would let you all know a little bit more about our invitations; what I used to make them and where I found all of my supplies.

Pocketfolds – Colorplan Col25 Amethyst 145mm Book Pocketfold – PDA Card & Craft;
Gatefolds – Colorplan Col25 Amethyst 145mm Gatefold creased cards – PDA;
Purple Card {ribbon bellyband seal} – Dark purple card – the Paper Mill;
Grey Card {invite/rsvp backing & bellyband seal} – Colorplan Col29 Dark Grey Card – PDA;
Paper – Sparkling White Iridescent paper from the Folio range at Paper State – Hobbycraft;
Purple Ribbon – Purple Satin ribbon – Kate’s Paperie;
White Ribbon – White Organdy ribbon – Kate’s Paperie;
Grey Ribbon {ribbon bellyband} – Smoked Grey ribbon from Berisfords – Swift-Hart Boxes;
Stamp – Linden Branch Stamp – Unity Stamp Company;
Ink – Violet Versacolor ink from Tsukineko – Hobbycraft;
Tools – Stamp-a-ma-jig; Fiskars Paper Trimmer; Fiskars Drops corner rounder;
Glue – Double sided permanent transfer tape from Stix 2 – Hobbycraft;
Translucent Envelopes – 155mm Square Envelopes – Ideal Envelopes;
White RSVP Envelopes – 120mm Square Envelopes – PDA;

To print everything I just used my standard inkjet printer and it coped very well with the load! The information & map / directions insert sheets were both double sided which also turned out great.

All of our guests loved them and I have had loads of lovely comments about them. Everyone thought the insert sheets were really helpful and loved that we had included an RSVP sheet & envelope which also included the transport option on it. My mum is currently collecting them all together as we used their address since the invites came from both sets of our parents. We wanted to do this since they are both helping us with the wedding and we thought it was a lovely touch for those friends of my parents who wouldn’t know Grahams parents and vice versa. My aunt, who we obviously know is coming, doesn’t want to send the rsvp back as she wants to keep the whole invite together to show people and another friend had to contact me to get our gift list details as she had taken the invite to show her mum and left it there. Other friends of my parents also told me on Sunday that they had all been taking them everywhere to show everyone!

For our evening invites, we amended the main wording to suit and then amended the other insert sheets accordingly. They were then put in a gatefold card to make them a bit different but they used the same ribbon bellyband & envelopes.

Since we didn’t actually send invites to our parents, as they came from them, both my mum and Grahams mum wanted a version to keep as well so I amended the main invite wording just to say ‘request the pleasure of your company’ rather than a name as per the other guests ones. I now also need to do 1 of both the day and evening invites for us to keep too.

I haven’t really counted the total cost of them yet but that wasn’t the reason I decided to make them. I really wanted to design and make my own stationery right from the start and knew that this way I could get something that no one else had that was totally unique to us. Obviously I did look at loads of different ideas online and when I first started searching for ideas I found this US wedding blog {http://roadtotheaisle.blogspot.com which was my original inspiration to also start blogging} and I loved the ribbon bellyband idea she had done. Since then I also found loads of examples / ideas from sellers on Etsy.

The rest of our stationery also uses the same them and we have already completed the favour boxes using the same seal as the ribbon bellyband. We have also completed the order of service’s and menu’s which used the same purple card, sparkly paper, grey ribbon and a card & paper seal like the invites. The table plan, table names and placecards also used the same card & a thinner version of the purple ribbon, but we also used a different punch on those. Since the tables are going to be named after buildings in New York, which is my favourite city and where we got engaged, we found a Martha Stewart edge punch which had a city skyline on it. We have used it on the top of the paper on the individual placecards, each table name and each table list on the table plan, which I think all look really good.