Wedding Shower Wednesday: Invites

Dear Em,
When your daddy & I were married, we made a lot of things for the wedding  (with the help of our talented family & friends). After a long day of work, it was kind of fun to make something & let my creativity flow. Do I ever want to plan another wedding? Heck no! It was one of the most stressful times of my life. But when a wedding shower comes along, it's super fun to have to get artsy & create on a much smaller scale. Since wedding season is underway, on the next few Wednesdays I'm going to talk about fun DIY wedding shower ideas.

Two of our very favorite people in life are getting married this May. You're going to be the most adorable flower girl (as long as we start practicing soon). Daddy is the Best Man, & I'm a bridesmaid.

A few weekends ago we spent a snowy day in Connecticut throwing the bride a bridal shower. Erin has a large & amazing bridal party who all worked so hard to make her day beautiful & special. I signed up for a few projects that would be fun for me to make. My first project was designing the wedding invitations. There are so many cute options out there, but we knew that we could save money by making our own.

I started by searching the web for examples. Wedding Paper Divas & Tiny Prints had so many fun & beautiful invites. I got ideas for wording & style mostly from those sites.

In the end, this was the wording we decided on:

A sprinkle of flowers, a couple of kisses,

Soon Brian & Erin will be Mr. & Mrs.

As we wait for the special hour,

Let’s honor

Erin

With a Bridal Shower!

Saturday, March 31^st

11:00 am

Tamarack Lodge

21 Ten Rod Road

Voluntown, Connecticut

RSVP to XXXXX by March 16^th

Phone: XXX.XXX.XXXX  or  Email: XXXXX@XXXXXX.XXX

Erin is registered at XXXXXXXXX

& XXXXXXX 

The bride & groom got engaged on a beach & took their engagement pictures on that same beach. We had decided on a beach theme for the shower. I wanted to incorporate the theme & give the invitations a 3D look. I browsed Michaels & A.C. Moore for ideas. They had so many cute scrap booking stickers that would have been so fun.

I almost purchased these flip flops. At the time, buying the scrapbooking stickers in bulk seemed like it would be both expensive & difficult. I could only find 1/4 of what I needed in the store. Now that I write this post, I realize I could've easily ordered them online...oh, well.

That's when I came upon the craft punches. This sand dollar punch was less than $10 (with my Michaels 20% off coupon) & perfect for the invites. Plus, it not only punched out the sand dollar but also starfish...bonus! I bought scrap booking paper that matched the color of our bridesmaid dresses for about $.25 a sheet. I wanted two starfish & one sand dollar on each invite, so I had to punch out over 200. It took a little while to punch them all out & my hand was pretty sore, but at least I could do it while catching up on some of our DVRed shows.

The next step was finding paper. I had a hard time finding nice paper with matching envelopes in stores. I asked my go-to wedding blogger A Mountain Bride where to find paper. She asked her readers & Paper and More was suggested. Let's just say, I heart Paper and More. They had good selections, good quality, & good prices. I've ordered from them twice now (I may have messed up on the first order), & they upgraded me to priority shipping for free both times. I loved their line of recycled paper. The paper I bought was actually called Sand Specks which couldn't have gone more perfectly with the theme.

Once I had my paper, envelopes, sand dollar & star fish punches, glue (I bought my very first glue gun), & chai tea, I was ready to put it all together (yup, I used your table as a work station).

I know I'm not a graphic designer (or anything close), but I think they came out wicked cute for the special bride to be.

It was kinda fun to get my art on. Tune in next week for Project Wishing Well.

I love you so,

Mommy